From the Archives: Classical Education?

In our impatient age, we sometimes find that the time required for something to become a classic is getting shorter and shorter. Now, books and songs less than ten years old are readily pronounced as “classics”. I think also of newspaper advertisements for movies that regularly feature bold pronouncements such as “AN INSTANT CLASSIC!” That must be something like “instant friendship” or “instant wisdom”.

The word “classical” is also tossed around a lot in discussions of education and school reform. I would like to offer a few thoughts about this idea of the classic, and the extent to which Veritas Preparatory Academy might be considered classical.

Originally and primarily, the idea of the classical refers to the languages, literature, and history of ancient Greece and Rome. In this sense of the word, modern universities might still have a Classics department, devoted to teaching ancient languages and keeping students abreast of the latest archaeological finds in the Mediterranean and near East.

A century and a half ago, elite and exclusive schools in America and Europe made this kind of classical studies (minus archaeology—a more recent development) the overwhelming focus in the curriculum. Prep and boarding school students were drilled in very advanced Greek and Latin grammar and vocabulary, and they were often expected to deliver their own Latin orations, to memorize lengthy passages from Roman authors, and to compose their own rigidly metrical Latin poetry.

I think that it can be fairly asserted that this kind of 19th century classicism was often stale, dry, and rigid. It tended to idolize all that was Greek and Roman, and to ignore or discount everything else. It treated the Greco-Roman past with an indiscriminate reverence and interest, and it squeezed the life out of the Latin and Greek languages, reducing them to endless charts to be memorized.

This musty version of classicism—the worship of the past for the past’s sake—is not what Veritas Preparatory Academy is all about. The Latin language is indeed a part of our curriculum, and Greek and Roman authors are found throughout the upper-level Humane Letters seminars of future years, but a quick glance at the recent Saturnalia party, or one of Mr. Sullivan’s games of “Simonis dicit” will show that the ancient classics are approached in a spirit of joy at Veritas.

But there is a second meaning of the word, derived from the first, and no longer narrowly confined to the study of antiquity. In this context, a classic refers generally to something old and good, to something of proven and lasting value. In this sense, the great Greek and Roman authors Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, and Vergil are rightly called classic authors, for they are old and good. But now we also find that not all of Greek and Roman literature is worthy of the name “classic”—for while all of it is old, NOT all of it is of equally high quality.

Now we can open up the field to great books that would have seemed vulgar or unworthy to a 19th century schoolmaster: Dante, Dickens, Coleridge—maybe even the barbaric Shakespeare! A curriculum of classics can now rightly include the great books beloved by the schoolmasters of old, but it is also open to the great storytellers and thinkers of all of Western history—not just those who wrote and thought in its formative, Greco-Roman era.

I would offer the following as a thesis: the schooling offered by Veritas Preparatory Academy places emphasis upon the classics—things of proven and lasting value—but not to the complete exclusion of things that are changing and contemporary. We offer students the chance to think about things that are of perennial and lasting importance: truth, beauty, and goodness; Western history (the legacy of which we continue to live with): classic literature, philosophy, art, and music; the eternal abstractions of geometry and algebra. But we also offer students a window into the ever-growing and changing body of knowledge found in the natural sciences of biology, geology, astronomy, and others.

I believe, in conformity to the Academy’s practice, that secondary schooling rightly gives priority to things of lasting value. I also think that it is misguided to give curricular space to “current issues” and contemporary entertainment—the lives of young people are already full of that, and school should not strive to duplicate it.

We offer students an encounter with their ancient, classical heritage, with the classics of the West’s last two thousand years, and with modern knowledge about the physical world. Such schooling can rightly be called classic—it offers its recipients the opportunity to clarify their understanding of the present through an encounter with the past, and to see the classics of the past in the light of their modern lives.

Andrew Ellison
Founding Headmaster

December, 2003