Lee T. Pearcy is the Director of Curriculum and Lounsbery Chair in Classics at the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania. Pearcy has authored or coauthored The Homeric Hymn to Apollo (1981), Mediated Muse (1984), The Shorter Homeric Hymns (1989), New First Steps in Latin (1999), New Second Steps in Latin (2001), and New Third Steps in Latin (2003).

THE GRAMMAR OF OUR CIVILITY

Classical Education in AmericaBy Lee T. Pearcy

Baylor University Press

Copyright © 2005 Baylor University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932792-16-4

Contents

Foreword.....................................................ix1 The Grammar of Our Civility................................12 The American Dialect.......................................433 Finis: Four Arguments against Classics.....................854 Prolegomena to a Pragmatic Classicism......................117Notes........................................................147Works Cited..................................................161Index........................................................173

Chapter One

THE GRAMMAR OF OUR CIVILITY

I want to talk about what happens when language no longer describes things, when words slip their moorings in reality. I want to make the case for paying attention to a form of education that hardly anyone in American universities practices.

Here is what happened.

Coca-Cola. Aspirin. Yellow boxes of dynamite. Bulldozers. Nails. Cartons of Luckies. Two-way radios. Diesel fuel. Hand grenades. Eveready batteries. Iodine. Flour. Artillery shells.

The soldiers came suddenly, bringing all these things and more. The islanders watched airstrips unroll in the jungle, C-47's bumble down, more and more things move down the ramps. The white men's world and its war made no sense to the islanders. They knew only that the foreign soldiers called their wealth "cargo," and that when certain things were done, Cargo came.

Then the soldiers were gone.

The islanders tried to bring back the strangers and their wealth. They built landing strips in the jungle, control towers of logs lashed together, radios of twigs with dials made of stone and seashells. They performed the rites of summoning Cargo as they had seen the visitors perform them.

No Cargo came. The islanders were not discouraged. Cargo had come, once upon a time; there was no doubt of it. If it did not come now, the problem was with their performance of the rites or with their faith. They constructed, gradually, an elaborate system to make sense of every particular of what they were doing, including its internal contradictions. In this system they found consolation and meaning.

In modern American universities professors of Classics, the study of ancient Greece and Rome, continue to perform rites that once worked. They teach and study Greek and Latin literature, sift what evidence there is for the history of Greece and Rome, pore over manuscripts, and examine sherds. Few of them, once beyond the first steps in their profession, give much thought to why they do these things. They enjoy what they do, they are good at it, and there is a living to be made. If someone asks what good these activities do (a slightly different and harder question), the professors may hesitate, but sooner or later they answer, and their answers always contain the same theme. The professors appeal for validation of their activities to known and verifiable historical circumstances. Classics, they suggest, is an important subject and worth doing because it has nearly always been important and worth doing. From roughly the Renaissance to the First World War, Classics was at the center of a certain kind of European and American education. To be educated, to be civilized, to be a gentleman, meant to be acquainted with the languages, literature, and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

The professors are right. Education in the vanished cultures of Greece and Rome once formed an intelligible system of theory, technique, and practice. The system was essential and was seen to be essential within the societies it served. It was a code, but the code made sense because it expressed a single, if manifold, purpose. In all societies where it dominated education in the Renaissance and after, Classics was designed to form the tastes, values, and attitudes of the governing class.

The great beings did appear with their Cargo, once upon a time not so long ago, when every schoolboy knew his Latin and some knew their Greek. But what classicists do now must seem to an external observer as absurd as trying to summon a C-47 full of chocolate bars with a radio made of palm fronds and seashells.

University teaching, in any subject, is full of absurdities. The researcher at the edge of knowledge must teach the undergraduate needing remedial work. Two faculty members in the same field may have hardly any point of intellectual contact, so that a man beavering away on "IG II236: The So-called Foundation Charter of the Corinthian League-a Heresy?" may have nothing whatever to discuss with a woman thinking hard on her next paper, "Grenouilles de Passage: Aristophanes' Liminal Frogs."

It is not, however, the contradictions shared with other fields that make Classics resemble an intellectual Cargo Cult. The contrast between how university teachers of Classics think about their field and how they present it in the classroom, or between one researcher's jargon and another's, does not account for the peculiar existential dilemma of Classics. That absurdity comes from the contrast between vanished Cargo and twigs and stones, between the sophistication, coherence, and directed purpose of traditional classical education and the nave, fragmented, aimless parody that passes for Classics in most universities today.

Well-meaning people sometimes speak of education as a set of messages to be transmitted from teacher to student. When a student can recall or repeat the message, when the student knows who wrote Don Quixote or what were the three principal causes of the Vietnam War, education has taken place. Multiple-choice tests can measure the transmission, and numbers can express its efficiency.

If the analogy with transmitting a message contributes to an accurate description of education, then we have no choice but to conclude that many of the best and most creative minds have been those for whom education has failed. They persist, and we hope they persist, in getting the messages wrong. Einstein, a story goes, refused to memorize his telephone number or any other fact that he could look up. The tale may be apocryphal. It is suspiciously close to the clich of the absentminded professor and to the late Romantic notion that the creative mind is unfettered by trivialities. Sherlock Holmes, readers of the Canon will recall, refused to clutter his mind with irrelevant facts like the Copernican system. Einstein, absent-minded professor, and fictional consulting detective embody a widely held conviction: the best minds are those for whom any message they have received from education is far less important than the new meanings into which they transform what they have learned. Even for the person who is not an Einstein, or a professor at all, education works best when it equips him to create new messages for new contexts.

A better analogy comes to mind. Education is not a message but the grammar of a language called culture. This grammar is not transmitted; it is acquired. Whoever acquires it is free from the limitations imposed by the facts he has learned. Just as someone who knows a language can generate sentences that he has never been taught, so someone who has been educated can generate new ideas, new interpretations of old facts, new statements about reality. The great, creative intellects are those for whom education as grammar has not failed. They are those who have mastered the language which...