Tracy Lee Simmons
Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002
246 pp., $24.95 hc
Linda Gillison
Classics & Chair, Foreign Language & Literature
UM-Missoula
Tracy Simmons's recent book, winner of the prestigious Choice award as Academic Title for 2002, is a lucid and orderly contribution to the current lively debate about education as preparation to live now and in the future.
Simmons is a journalist and a humanist, with a Master's in Classics from Oxford University. Though he does not make his living as a classicist, he realizes the value of what he learned, and urges adoption of the Classics curriculum for a world where education and society sometimes seem engulfed in a kind of pre-cosmos chaos.
The curriculum he proposes and defends (hence the "apology" in the ancient sense), is a demanding "climb" not accomplished quickly or cheaply. But it may lead us in a most valuable direction and richly repay the trouble. Neither trendy nor politically correct, Simmons's book deserves careful attention and thought.
Parnassus, the craggy mountain which shelters and looms above the ancient shrine of Apollo in Greece, has long represented the "source and perfection of poetic inspiration," and Simmons uses the phrase "climbing Parnassus" as a code, familiar to generations before us, for the "painfully glorious exertions of Greek and Latin study."
Displaying the careful thought and painstaking but elegant expression which he claims are benefits of a rigorous classical education, Simmons argues that the study of classical Greek and Latin both demands and teaches discipline, and hones valuable skills, such as accurate analysis and successful synthesis of detail; and that the study of classical civilization teaches perspective, respect for historical precedent, admiration for bold endeavor, and healthy awareness of human strengths and limitations. (He does not maintain that the classical education necessarily creates "nice" people, nor does he overlook the painful methods by which many generations of English schoolchildren learned the classical languages.)
Simmons focuses, not on classical scholarship or the profession of "Classics," but on "classical education," which he defines early on as a course of study "grounded upon--if not strictly limited to--Greek, Latin, and the...civilization from which they arose." As a lucid writer and thinker and one who understands the centrality of clarity to honest persuasion, he states his goal succinctly and early. He explains the origin and goals of classical education in Great Britain and the U.S. and then advocates its resurrection in the public education system of contemporary America. With careful attention to details, he guides the reader from the days of Renaissance humanism through Reformation England and the Augustan Age to the early twentieth century, when a whole generation of young British men--T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden--who had cut their teeth on the painful learning of Greek and Latin were shocked out of the old world and into the new by the war to end all wars. The post-Great War world, he claims, turned to commercial and "useful" knowledge, and became a world where "credentialed science was to rule forevermore" (149).
In this new world, the Classics began to fall out of favor in the schools and be reserved for specialists. Henceforth, according to Simmons, "'appreciation' replaced rigor, and work was no longer required" for entry into the ranks of the lettered. His description of modern education and its plight will also ring true to many of us: "demands on education are now largely commercial," hyper-utilitarian, and based on new and newer gospels of life and learning. Rare the constituency that supports Greek, Latin, and classical civilization, the study of which earlier generations valued as the best foundation for the "useful" citizen of an active and changing world.
Although Simmons believes that "knowledge is useful" (213), he reminds us that we cannot know where it may take us or just what kind of use we will make of it. He relates a delightful anecdote about a former student of the classicist Cyril Bailey of Oxford, who--though in business--used to carry a text of Homer or Virgil in his pocket to work. When his colleagues asked him "what was the use of all this Greek and Latin," he answered with classical clarity and brevity, "No use, thank God" (215). Emerson once said that "the adoption of the test 'what is it good for' would abolish the rose and exalt in triumph the cabbage." Simmons adds, "and man cannot live by cabbage alone" (213). "We drift," he says, "floating on our own deracinated, exiguous islands...fodder for demagogues" (20). Without the connecting tissue of culture, we have nothing to hold us together. John Donne's lament at the very start of the modern period came to my mind: "'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone." Simmons laments the "rough, formless mind" (187), the "disheveled mind" (112) which prevents our knowing "where we came from, or where we might be going." For a society whose young, at least, are victims of computers, videos, television, political sophistry; who, many feel, have no sense of perspective, realize no healthy limits, assume absurd self-sufficiency, and will "come to no good" (the old lament), Simmons has one prescription: the classical education of language and civilization without which..."we are like someone whose memory doesn't reach back before the day before yesterday" (210).
Not all will agree with Simmons's analysis, and his plan is just never going to be popular. He uses far too many metaphors of discipline and hard work and focus: calisthenics, cultivation, formation, molding, horticulture--all bringing to mind tiring endeavor and dogged direction toward a valuable goal of change and improvement. And, like C.S. Lewis and Aristotle before him, he has the nerve to distinguish between "the education that democrats like" and "the education which will preserve democracy" (154).
Electives have little space in Simmons's proposed curriculum (158). When he warns that his plan will not be for everyone, the impolitic specter of elitism rears its head to be answered by C.S. Lewis: "equality, so valuable as a legal fiction for a just society, still has no place in the life of the mind" (153). But Simmons urges that classical education be a supported option for anyone who desires it, since the requirements for success in such a curriculum are demanding but can be found in most people: intelligence, curiosity, doggedness for detail; willingness to take pains; concern for the "exact meaning" of words and ideas.
Simmons's claims for an education based on Greek and Latin languages and their civilization are not modest. The demanding study can form habits of mind which include carefulness, attention to detail, and ability to analyze information and then synthesize into a meaningful whole. Work toward clear and high standards will form the intellect and supply, when needed, the kind of reality check which seems so badly needed among today's students, many of whom seem to suffer from the feel-good methods of an education which never seeks to pressure. In short, from classics we can confidently expect to earn what our society needs from each of us willing to work at it: "a mind at once agile and civilized, one able to place the society in which it belongs into some scheme of history" (186). We can "push back the chaos" (179).
While some school districts, including Missoula's District 1, are proposing to drop Latin from the curriculum, in other parts of the country the solid benefits of even limited Latin study are being rediscovered. In Maryland, a course in Latin is a central element in a summer program preparing poor high school students for college. Elsewhere, Latin is used with elementary-level children in inner-city Baltimore to improve vocabulary, understanding of syntax, and general reading ability. Those of us who teach Classical languages in the university know well how often our students really only begin to get a grip on their own (usually, in Montana) native English as they confront the challenge of a highly analytical language like Latin or Greek.
I missed some things in this book, such as footnotes. They comfort a curious academic reader who has the ability to check sources directly. No doubt such "pedantic" trappings have been dropped to make the book attractive to a broader audience--certainly Simmons's wish. I also missed a list of ancient sources in the bibliography.
I was refreshed, nonetheless, by Tracy Lee Simmons's eloquent, spirited, and even hopeful defense of a curriculum which may be considered conservative by some, but which is the most intellectually liberating of them all.
Why climb Parnassus? Why climb any mountain?