My Facebook feed has been cluttered this week with people posting this remark attributed to the late Joseph Sobran: "In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching Remedial English in college."
Let's unpack some of what is in this.
First, a century ago, many fewer young people went to college at all, and they usually came from schools with curriculum designed to prepare for a college education. And, mind you, even then, scholarship was not necessarily pronounced. In the Ivy League colleges, the "gentleman's C" was entirely satisfactory, because valuable connections and networking easily compensated for a mediocre education.
It is a mistake to equate the students of that era with the great surge after the Second World War of students seeking college educations for the first time in their families, a much wider range of students coming from public schools generally rather than selective academies. So this "gone from teaching" oversimplification ignores complex social and educational developments of the past seventy years. It is less an analysis than a slogan, a sneer at current students that overlooks the possibility that they might be at school to learn something.*
But at bottom the Sobran complaint is the tired conservative trope, repeated generation from generation, that there was a time in the past when people were smarter and more capable, compared to the degenerate present. Cicero complained that people were no longer speaking good Latin. Egbert of Liege bemoaned that "scholarly effort is in decline everywhere as never before" in the eleventh century. Jonathan Swift wrote in 1712 that people had so corrupted the English language that the Crown should establish an academy to regulate it. It was always better in the past, for those of us who recall it.
Posting the Sobran sneer does not make one a brave voice crying in the wilderness. It is rather, and merely, a badge of smugness.
*Perhaps it is worth saying that when I graduated from a public high school in Appalachia in 1969 (having in fact have taken two years of Latin), I was competent to write at the high school level. I had to learn, at college, how to write at the college level. I assumed that that was what it was for.
Furthermore, the quote takes as unquestioned that proficiency in Latin and Greek is the goal, or at least the path to being educated. To what purpose? If the student aspires to be a medieval priest or an Enlightenment man of letters, sure: Latin is necessary, and a bit of Greek is useful. But the traditional curriculum lasted far past those things, degenerating into merely a class marker.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong. I am far from the position that college should be a fancy vocational program. But go on about Latin and Greek and I will roll my eyes.
I do recall befriending a philosophy professor in Rome, when I briefly visited in 1993. He spoke little English, and I spoke little Italian. I was apologetic for the latter, but he waived off my concern, asking me if I would prefer we speak in Latin or (I presume Classical) Greek. As three years of high school Latin had prepared me for neither, we used his wife (an English teacher in Rome) as a translator. At the time, I did pine for a time (unknown to me) where scholarly communication was not relegated to what universally passes for English.
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