"To climb Parnassus was to strive after the favor of Apollo and the nine muses - calliope, Erato, Clio, Euterpe, Melpomene, polymnia, Thalia, Terpsichore, Urania"
"And among those gifts most sought was the civilizing, cultivating book of eloquence, of right and beautiful expression."
"The hard, precipitous path of classical education ideally led not to knowledge alone, but to the cultivation of mind and spirit. Knowledge did not, in and of itself, justify the sweat. The climb was meant to transform one's intellectual and aesthetic nature as well."
This book, Climbing Parnassus, makes the case for the lost study of the classical works. I enjoyed the book thoroughly and will add it to my collection. I've written a bit about what a classical education was, and the author of this book can set you on the right track, if you want to take the challenge yourself.
As for me and my house, we will be studying Latin and Greek.
Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
"Early humanistic education began with the cultivation of character. Whatever intellectual feats a man might bring off, they were of scant value if he had not first achieved a goodness and tranquility of the soul."
"The cultivated man was, in a real sense, the literary man, the man of words."
"After Isocrates, intellectual culture became scribal; it depended on books, written words, collections of which overtime with foreman authoritative list of best works."
"Isocrates taught all who came after that anyone, before he can be called civilized, has to read his culture's books."
"Originality was not price so much as reverence."
"Whatever wisdom is, we're not born with it."
"Isocrates did not, leaving a "sound judgment "to be the proper and realistic aim; the best one could hope to do is to point up the finest examples in the annals of virtuous thoughts and deeds."
"With the Gramatiko students learn to understand and explain what they read, not to "respond" to it. Their opinions were worthless."
'A training in rhetoric, the art of persuasion an eleoquence, might last until a young man's 20s, and its pursuit made up what we now call "higher education." It was finishing school for the articulate. To Speak well was the indispensable ability – and unmistakable sign – of the educated man, whose upper education had instilled recte loquendi scientia, the knowledge of correct speaking."
"They had learned to think and speak and write with precision and flair. They tried not to say something new; they tried to say something worthy, and to say it perfectly"
"The standard was set not by the man in the street, but by the man in the forum."
"For the ancients were marked, as Marrou wrote, by an "utter lack of interest in child psychology. "There's were not "child – centered" societies."
"Greek and Latin weren't needed to get out of the university, they were necessary to get in."
"Never have so many people earned so many academic degrees and known so little. Yet never have so many thought they know so much."
Reading this book brought me back to the difference between the education I had when growing up vs. the education the author talks about from antiquity. The ancients were concerned with reading the best books, reading them with reverence, and then trying to master the art of writing, as the ancients had done themselves. This was the civilizing side to education. Education was not a training for a job, it was cultivation for life.
I remember some of the first courses in philosophy I took at the university where we were to critique some of Plato's writings. But the idea to me was ludicrous on its face. How was I, a university freshman, supposed to critique Plato? I had barely read any of his works, let alone the work of any other ancient Grecian. The idea is still silly to me, and yet this is what passes for education, a series of 'responses' to ideas and writings we have no understanding of, with no context which to judge them.
And then that's when I realized that most of my education was just the reading and rebutting other 'experts' talking about their interpretation of the source material. That's it. Experts talking about their expertness. What hubris! What silly people to think they could expound on Plato, Aristotle, Tacitus, Dionysos, Longinus, Quintilian, Cicero and many, many more. What balderdash!
And yet this is what it means to be educated today.
For me, education must start with a serious reverence for these great minds. Then, if possible, to train your own mind to think like theirs and to write like they wrote. If one can do this, they will have cultivated the one thing that separates us from the beasts in the wild and the wild barbarians; they will have cultivated their own intellect and their own expression of their intellect through the written word.
