Climbing Parnassus - 3 - Learn Greek and Latin
Chapter Three
Quote
"Education should not be preparation for making a living, but a preparation for living."
Notes
🔥 "The popular idea of democracy is animated by a very strong resentment of superiority." This resentment for superiority makes classical education look elitist, the way that it puts certain books, certain writers, and certain time periods above all others. But what better way to learn to speak, write, and think than from those who were the best in history?
🔥 Someone who is well-read in the classics "views any contemporary phenomena from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective."
🔥 "Much of the plagues assailing the mind could be traced to a person's ignorance of Grammar." Knowing how to write and speak is knowing how to think. And learning Greek and Latin is the best way to acquire a holistic and deep knowledge of language and grammar.
🔥 The sheer difficulty of Latin and Greek, the highly organized structure of these languages, the need of scrupulous search to find the nearest equivalents for words that differ widely in their scope of meaning from their derivatives in any modern vocabulary, the effort of lifting one's self out of the familiar rut of ideas into so foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic exercise to the brain.
🔥 60% of all English words come from Latin. Learning Latin helps us learn English much more deeply and more at the root level.
🔥 "Not to know Greek is to be ignorant of the most flexible and subtle instrument of expression which the human mind has devised."
🔥 The resulting precision that comes from learning the classical languages is a "perpetual discipline of accuracy in thought and word, and a rod for the back of journalistic chattering."
🔥 The modern teacher doesn't really teach. They "facilitate." They don't teach concrete knowledge. They ask students to give their opinions about a poem. That's not education. It also makes students think they have knowledge on their own, or that they're "cultured" when they're really not.
🔥 "Will one follow fashion and the personal whims of the moment? Or will one take his cues from what has been established as the best the world has to offer?"
🔥 The classics were a massive influence on the founding fathers of the United States. We should read what they were reading.
🔥 Cicero: "For what is the life of man, if memory of the past be not interwoven in the life of later times?"
🔥 The classics are useful as well as being enjoyable and rewarding on their own. But we should be careful about the idea that education should be strictly "useful". Aristotle said, "To seek utility everywhere is most unsuitable to lofty and free natures."
🔥 "The bloodstream of European literature is Latin and Greek."
🔥 Reading English translations of the classics is okay. But they are noticeably missing something from the original languages (noticeable for people who are able to read the originals).
🔥 The author has more to say about relativism and equality (perhaps in a more controversial tone): "Multiculturalism has enslaved the American mind to the idea that all societies, all ways of life, all ways of thinking and feeling, are equally valuable and worth the narrow beaming of academic study." Classical education takes another view which is that we can and should make judgments about what is the best thing to study and to learn from. And then choose to focus and study the best things.
🔥 "Happy the man who can understand the causes of things." We must know, remember, and return to our origins.
Thoughts
Part of me feels like this book could have been a magazine article and still get across the same thing. There are lots of poetic quotes about why classical education is important, but less when it comes to anything practical (though that might have been on purpose). A few ideas are returned to over and over again without much new being added.
That all being said, the idea of learning to read Latin and Greek is compelling. Reading the thoughts of someone who lived a thousand years ago already seems like the closest thing to a time machine we'll ever be able to get. I imagine being able to read those thousand year-old thoughts in their original language would be even more immersive in terms of transporting you back to that time and place in our history.