Stephen Wellman

Prior to the reforms of this century, education was centered on the classic texts of the Western Canon. American students learned to read not with the aid of watered down textbooks and graphics, but by reading the King James Bible. This education was rooted in the three R’s and then moved on to Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. As the students progressed, they were taught the basics of science, the fundamentals of Christian theology, and the art of rhetoric. College was the culmination of an academic career spent emersed in the classics, not an opportunity to gain a four year union card. One of the signs of the educated was their ability to quote lines from antiquity at a moment’s notice.

This all began to change in the early part of the 20th Century when John Dewey and the pragmatists began undermining much of classical pedagogy and replaced it with dumbed down curricula and "learning by doing." This was termed "education for democracy" and was intended give more Americans access to education.

These reforms continued in the 1950s as the University was converted into what Russell Kirk called "Behemoth U.," a large carnival that afforded the student access to thousands of pre-professional classes and very specified majors, but offered the student little means of preparing himself for life as a virtuous person. The academy’s destruction was hastened by the libertine attitudes of college students demanding an end to the parietals on their campuses. The administrators capitulated, and the post-modern mess that surrounds us is the direct result. More people have college degrees than ever but fewer people seem to understand their own culture. We are a society of educated ignorance.

In his new book, The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition, Professor E. Christian Kopff argues for a return to the classical curriculum as the solution for the problems that ail our educational system. Kopff quickly points out that this text is not "a work of political theory." Instead, it is "a series of essays about the health and vitality of America’s classical and Christian traditions, the errors of the current powers that be, and, most important, the ways in which creativity and order might be restored in spite of the powers." For Kopff, the classical curriculum is more than four years spent in preparation for a job or an attempt to experiment with the newest theories on cognitive operation; it is the inculcation of virtue and a life-long pursuit of the wisdom of our ancestors.

The structure of Kopff’s argument is decidedly simple. He opens by arguing for the creative nature of tradition. "Tradition is not a cage. It is the goldfish bowl that keeps us alive." He traces the development of science from Thales to Galileo, demonstrating how each new scientist traced his inspiration from the previous generations.

Kopff credits Plato with inspiring one of this century’s greatest minds, Werner Heisenberg—the German physicist responsible for establishing our current view of optics and the notion of uncertainty. "Heisenberg was not a Platonist. Heisenberg’s thinking became creative, however, when he stepped out of the confines of his own age and attached himself to the tradition of science, stretching out over the millennia from Athens to Munich—and which is still alive in our own universities today!"

Seeking to place meaning back into the educational process, Kopff then argues for the need for narrative structure in the curriculum. In this, he means the re-institution of great books into the curricula and the instruction of those texts in their original languages. For Kopff, classical languages provide a narrative by giving the student access not only to the history and myths of Western Civilization, but also access to them in their original form.

The learning of the languages itself creates an historical connection between the students and their ancestors. He blames the modern malaise most students experience on this lack of narrative in their educational experience. "Denied these stories by the present education system, students become like the anti-heroes of modern novels: people trapped in a world they cannot understand, bit players in a drama whose basic themes remain a mystery to them. The abolition of Latin and Greek effectively severed an entire culture from the stories that constituted, or should have constituted, its mental infrastructure. It is little wonder that many elite Americans often find Franz Kafka more appealing than Samuel Johnson. Their lives are simply absurd."

Kopff does not provide an easy solution to the problems he sees in this cultural alienation. While simply reading the classical texts in translation—the Great Books programs that are modeled on the programs at the University of Chicago and St. John’s College—may seem like a solution, he does not accept it. "Young people were to read the Great Books as a means of getting introduced to the narrative that their own lives were to continue but without having to pay the price their elders paid. It was civilization on the cheap." Great Books programs may be preferable to the post-modern zoo that confronts students at most colleges, they do not provide the students with the real, linguistic, connection with their heritage.

During the devolution of the academy, the Great Books programs not only diminished the role of classics in the university curricula but also allowed the reformers more ability to eliminate classic texts from the canon. Kopff quotes Paul Shorey, Professor of Greek at the University of Chicago and vocal critic of the Great Books reforms, "‘Greek and Latin have become mere symbols and pretexts. They [the advocates of reform] are as contemptuous of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, Burke, John Stuart Mill, Tennyson, Alexander Hamilton, or Lowell as of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, or Horace. They will wipe the slate clean of everything that antedates Darwin’s Descent of Man.’ Shorey was a prophet."

Leaving these criticisms, Kopff proceeds to demonstrate the value of a classical education through a series of essays that examine everything from the current trend of post-modernism to the Rambo film series. Through the essays in this section of the book, he attempts to argue for the necessity of the classical canon when examining great literature, appreciating art, and for even analyzing classical themes in contemporary cinema. Kopff proves that it is the classical academic who is the best reader of our modern dilemma and the only person capable of healing our intellectual disease.

The source of our prevailing post-modern discontent, according to Kopff, is the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the inventor of the "sign/signifier/signified" linguistic paradigm. This distinction comes from a series of lectures he delivered, which was published posthumously. Saussure’s "signifier" laid the groundwork for the destruction of language study. His denial of the connection between a spoken word and its object meant that words could no longer "tell us anything about the outside world." In essence, "we are all trapped in the funhouse of language."

The "insanity of theorists went further than this." The post-modernists have not only denied the connection of language to outside reality but went on to deny the existence of an objective reality. Kopff realizes the origin of this insanity, and he traces these ideas to their sources in Plato’s dialogues. While many of the post-modernists may be influenced by Nietzche, Kopff directs us to Nietzche’s inspiration, Callicles—Socrates’ opponent in Plato’s Gorgias. Saussure’s ideas about language can be found in another of Plato’s works, the Cratylus. In both of these texts, these now post-modern ideas are ridiculed as silly expressions of sophistry. Today, they are celebrated as genius.

Professor Kopff fears that if post-modernism is not cured, the humanities may suffer the same fate as Michel Foucault and many his followers. "One bright young theorist supposedly told his friends as he lay dying of AIDS, ‘I die happy, because I was infected by Michel Foucault.’"

He ends his argument where he began, by appealing for a return to the classics. Kopff encourages us to learn the classical languages on our own—no easy task. He is not here to make us feel good about ourselves. If this text has any mission, it is to point out how uneducated most Americans are. This is harsh criticism, but perhaps the only solution for our ignorance is to take up the professor’s challenge.