The Degeneration of Classical Education

The "Classical" education is, of course, largely a thing of the past, certainly in its more substantive forms--and not at all surprisingly.

There was a time when, for example, the study of Latin was eminently practical. In a period when the vernacular languages of the present were localized and unstandardized Latin had the virtue of being a highly standardized language that was internationally known by the educated elite of the Western world. It lent thus itself better to use when precision was called for, and when people were trying to communicate with others from outside their country, or even their village, than their native languages--and thus was the language of law, administration, diplomacy, science, scholarship, religion, higher culture across the culture region, the more in as the Roman legacy loomed so large in all these areas. (Thus, as late as 1687, did Newton write his Principia in that language.)

Of course, even by early modern times this was beginning to change, with the vernacular languages increasingly liable to precise and wide use--to national use, and even international use, and get used as such, with the fifteenth century seeing English come into its own, for example, and the sixteenth giving the English language the Tyndale Bible and Shakespeare, with all this proceeding through subsequent centuries there and everywhere else. The role of Latin in daily life shrank, and its prominence in education was increasingly a legacy of the past, surviving on inertia and, in the case of those discomfited by liberal and radical currents in the present day, rejection of the modern (preferring as they did the conservatism of what survived of the Ancients to the Enlightenment of their own time).

That made it a more strained, artificial, thing, and unsurprisingly a less successful thing, such that a Coleridge was to quip that a youth was no longer to be assumed capable of thinking in Latin--and increasingly, a Classical education's principal "benefit" the ability to superciliously toss about Latin tags, to the bewilderment and embarrassment of peers who had not had the "benefit" of an upbringing such as theirs. (Indeed, in such a manner did Percy Sillitoe in a now notorious tale find himself snubbed by the overgrown public school students of whom he found himself in charge--as head of Britain's Security Service!) By that point the fondness for the Classical languages as centerpieces of elite education was harder than ever to deny as plain and simple snobbery, with such episodes showing it.