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Classical Educationin AmericaThe study of ancient Greek and Latin long ago vanished frommost American classrooms, and with it has gone a special under -standing of the values and virtues prized by Western civilization.

B Y D A N I E L WA L K E R H O W E

The classics departments at most Ameri-can colleges and universities today carry the whiff of nos-talgia and old chalk dust. Latin and ancient Greek can’t com-pete with vocational disciplines such as engineering,business, and medicine. Classics programs are small andunderfunded, and when education budgets are squeezed,such programs are often among the first to go— the recentelimination of the classics department at the Albany branchof the State University of New York is but one prominentexample. In 2009, the College Board, which administers theSAT and advanced placement exams to millions of highschool students, discontinued the AP exam in Latin litera-ture. Fewer than 2,000 students sat to translate Cicero andparse the poetry of Catullus the last time the test was admin-istered. Though an AP exam on Virgil remains, the CollegeBoard’s decision further marginalized classical studies inAmerican education.

This state of affairs would come as a shock to theFounders. They believed that if a modern citizenry were tobenefit from the lessons of history, its members had toknow the history of Greece and Rome. And they viewed theyoung republic they were nurturing as in some ways arebirth of principles first implemented in the Roman

Republic. Recent books by Carl J. Richard, Caroline Win-terer, and several other scholars emphasize the attention theFounders paid to classical learning. So what has happenedto the classics in America since the Founding?

For several generations, classical antiquity remainedalive and well in the American republic, both within edu-cational institutions and in the larger society. Americancolleges required undergraduates to take Latin (and oftenGreek); they even usually demanded, as an admission pre-requisite, that applicants have taken instruction in one orboth languages. While Protestant, Catholic, and secularinstitutions differed on theology, in their emphasis on clas-sics they occupied common ground.

Ever since the Middle Ages, a classical education hadrepresented a synthesis of reason and virtue. Classical his-tory and literature presented a panoply of heroes to admireand celebrate. Roman writers such as Cicero and the twoCatos embodied not only the stern and self- denying virtuesthat appealed to Christian mentors but also republican val-ues with special relevance to Americans, such as devotionto the commonwealth rather than to any special interest orfaction. Besides, the effort of mastering the rigorous logicand grammar required to conjugate Latin verbs and declinenouns was itself regarded as a tool to teach young people self-discipline.

It was, by and large, white males who filled seats inclassrooms and were therefore the beneficiaries of classical

Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emer-itus at Oxford University and professor of history emeritus at the Univer-sity of California, Los Angeles. His book What Hath God Wrought: TheTransformation of America, 1815–1848 won the Pulitzer Prize for Historyin 2008.

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learning. But when secondary academies and colleges forwomen began to appear in antebellum America, they taughtLatin along with “feminine” pursuits including paintingand needlework, and the classical emphasis on elocutioninspired women’s rights activists such as Margaret Fuller. Bythe 1850s, a few schools in Northern cities offered a classi-cal education to young free African Americans. Missionar-

ies among Native American people taught Latin as well asEnglish in their schools, hoping to prepare some of the stu-dents to go on to college. More fundamentally, the mis-sionaries were introducing native people to all aspects ofWestern civilization, from modern technology to Christi-anity, and they considered classical learning basic to thatproject of assimilation.

To be sure, there were those who agitated against Latinin the schoolroom. Benjamin Franklin criticized the focuson classical languages (though he was quite willing to makerhetorical use of his own hard- won classical learning in hiswritings). Eventually, universities responded to calls formore utilitarian training, establishing post graduate schoolsof medicine, law, and divinity. At the undergraduate level,however, educators dug in their heels: The purpose of col-lege was not to train students for a vocation, they insisted,but to improve their minds with a liberal education. Suchan education was called “liberal” because it was intended tobe liberating and hence suitable for a free person. (Libermeans “free” in Latin.)

T he definitive defense of a traditional liberal edu-cation that centered on classics appeared in theYale Report of 1828, drafted in response to a

request by the Connecticut legislature that the universitydo away with its Greek and Latin entrance requirementsin favor of modern languages. “The models of ancient lit-erature,” wrote Yale president Jeremiah Day, “which are

put into the hands of the young student, can hardly fail toimbue his mind with the principles of liberty, to inspire theliveliest patriotism, and to excite [him] to noble and gen-erous action, and are therefore peculiarly adapted to theAmerican youth.” Modern history and modern foreign lan-guages were eventually offered as electives at most collegesbefore the Civil War, but classics, along with some required

mathematics and science,remained the core disci-pline, as historian Carl J.Richard documents in TheGolden Age of the Classicsin America (2009).

Dickinson College inPennsylvania was typical:Freshmen studied Sallust,Horace, and Xenophon.

Sophomores absorbed themselves in Cicero, Horace,Xenophon, and Euripides. Juniors took Sophocles, Euripi-des, Cicero, Juvenal, and Perseus. And seniors finished offwith Aeschylus, Tacitus, and Terence. Even at the Univer-sity of Virginia, famous for its elective system, studentshad to pass a Latin exam to graduate, and as late as the 1850sLatin remained the largest department.

At the beginning of the 19th century, undergraduatecourses concentrated on the Latin and Greek languagesthemselves. Students translated texts and wrote composi-tions of their own in the ancient tongues. Educators inter-preted aptitude for such exercises as a measure of generalintelligence and believed that the texts provided models ofvirtue and vice. Soon, however, teachers set students to thetask of analyzing the content of the assigned texts and thevalues of classical civilization in general. They also began todevote more attention to Greek as compared with Latin, ascultural historian Caroline Winterer notes in her elegantbook The Culture of Classicism (2001). The shift reflecteda changing America. The Greeks appealed to the risingRomantic movement in literature and the arts. While theRomans had celebrated republican virtues, the Athenianshad embraced democracy and free thought. New attitudesfound new reasons for studying ancient times.

From the Middle Ages until the late 19th century, knowl-edge of the classics thus provided educated people theworld over with a common frame of reference. Physicianswrote their prescriptions in Latin; scientists still often pub-lished research papers in Latin to ensure a worldwide audi-

AT THE UNIVERSITY of Virginia, Latin

remained the largest department as late as

the 1850s.

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ence of fellow professionals. Lawyers buttressed their argu-ments with Latin phrases. Artists flattered their subjects bypainting or sculpting them in togas. Architects designedbuildings in the increasingly fashionable Greek Revivalstyle that we sometimes call “Federal,” its Doric, Ionic, andCorinthian columns providing an idiom of dignity andrationality to a variety of American structures, includingplantation homes, courthouses, banks, and churches. TheUnited States was self- consciously constructing itself as amodern version of a classical republic. Congress met in aRoman- style capitol, where in 1841 sculptor Horatio Gree-nough installed his famous statue of George Washingtoncast as the Greek god Zeus. (Within a few years, Victoriansensibilities found Greenough’s half- naked Washingtondiscomfiting, and it was removed. The statue now residesin the National Museum of American History.) Americansloved Greek and Roman names for new towns— Athens,Rome, Troy, Corinth, Ithaca, Syracuse. In Ohio alone, no

fewer than 35 towns were given classical names.Classical standards were not only illustrative and deco-

rative but in at least some areas profoundly influential. Theauthors of The Federalist justified balanced government,which the Constitution embodied, by invoking Aristotle andPolybius. Later, Southern politician and noted orator JohnC. Calhoun made use of classical political ideas in draftinghis own distinctive constitutional doctrines. Early Americanvoting requirements derived their legitimacy from classicalphilosophy. The ancient authorities had taught that a citi-zen should be “virtuous,” meaning that he should be dedi-cated to the welfare of the commonwealth, not his own self-interest. Voting qualifications were designed to keep theballot in the hands of those who could exercise such civicvirtue. Only men could demonstrate patriotic virtue throughmilitary service, so only men should vote. (Indeed, the word“virtue,” like “virility,” derives from the Latin vir, meaning“man.”) And only persons capable of exercising independ-

All eyes are on ancient Greece as Professor Herbert Wing Jr. instructs students at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania around 1945. But classicalinstruction in colleges across America was rapidly waning. In 1946, Dickinson stopped requiring bachelor of arts candidates to take Latin or Greek.

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ent judgment could attain public virtue. Hence, only menof property should vote, since (in the days before the secretballot) a servant would vote as his master told him.

Forty years ago, the eminent historian Gordon S. Woodasserted that the ratification of the U.S. Constitution marked“the end of classical politics.” He has since backpedaled. In

truth, classical republicanism remained prominent in Amer-ican education, culture, and political life until the Civil War.Far from standing in opposition to the early Industrial Rev-olution, classical learning at first expanded in response to it.The new commercial middle class felt eager to acquirerefinement, which it associated with classical knowledge.Coins with a classical goddess depicting Liberty, Greciangowns for women, and home décor items such as mirrorsencased in classical columns were popular. Steam- poweredpresses mass- produced classical texts printed on inexpen-sive paper for consumption by an increasingly literatepublic.

Both political parties exploited the classics to presenttheir arguments. The Jacksonian Democrats played uponthe classical republican virtues of thrift and distaste for lux-ury in their “war” on banks, especially the Bank of theUnited States. Missouri Democratic senator Thomas HartBenton invoked the upstanding farmers of Virgil’s Georgicsto advocate pricing western public lands as low as possible;his and fellow western congressmen’s efforts prevailed withthe passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The Jacksonians’rivals, the Whigs, employed classical republicanism to warnagainst the dangers of an overmighty executive and to advo-cate balanced government. To them, Andrew Jackson’s riseto political power from a military background smacked ofCaesarism.

Classical ideals of rhetoric and oratory governed 19th-century American practice. We still value eloquence, but inthose days elocution was taught in school, according torules laid down thousands of years earlier and transmitted

by modern teachers of rhetoric such as the Scottish profes-sor Hugh Blair, whose work was widely followed in theUnited States. Public speaking was an art form, practicedby politicians, lawyers, preachers, lyceum lecturers, dra-matic actors, and high school students. Their stylized per-formances attracted audiences that were often large and

sometimes all-too-passion-ately engaged. In 1849, thebloody Astor Place Riot left22 people dead after a dis-pute erupted between fansof two Shakespearean actorswho had rival theatricalinterpretations of Macbeth.

Dedicating the cemeteryon the battlefield of Gettys-

burg in November 1863, the famous orator Edward Everettheld forth for two hours. He described ancient Athenianfuneral customs, particularly the burial of those who fell atMarathon in graves on that historic battleground, and con-cluded by invoking Pericles’ tribute to the fallen of the Pelo-ponnesian War. Then President Lincoln delivered his two-minute address, perhaps the greatest piece of classicaloratory in American history. Without formal education,Abraham Lincoln had absorbed the conventions of classi-cal rhetoric through practical experience in law and politics.His address, as Garry Wills explains in Lincoln at Gettysburg(1992), demonstrated the Periclean model perfectly in its“compression, grasp of the essential, balance, ideality, andawareness of the deepest polarities in the situation.” Bothspeakers knew that the oratorical conventions theyemployed would resonate with an audience steeped in theclassical tradition.

Before the war, as the debate over slavery grew increas-ingly bitter, Southerners had enjoyed a marked advantagewhen they appealed to the authority of the classics. BothGreeks and Romans had practiced slavery, and Aristotle lenthis philosophy to its justification (though he gave his gameaway when he admitted that slaves were capable of friend-ship). American defenders of slavery such as GeorgeFitzhugh, Thomas Dew, and George Frederick Holmesclaimed that the enslavement of blacks undergirded theequality of white citizens in the South. They pointed to thecultural and artistic triumphs of Greco- Roman civilizationas vindicating slave society. For their part, abolitionistsmade use of the ancient principle of natural law in their

CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM remained

prominent in American education, culture,

and political life until the Civil War.

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arguments, but they usually invoked Enlightenment orChristian versions of it. Few abolitionists were willing to crit-icize classical civilization for countenancing slavery, fewer tocelebrate the bloody slave revolt of 73 bc led by the Romangladiator Spartacus.

Even while the classics enjoyed what Carl J. Richardcalls their “golden age” of prominence in antebellumAmerica, events were beginning to transform Amer-

ican life and politics. Although historians’ attention gener-ally has been focused on Jacksonian democracy, Americanpolitical culture was influenced at least as much by improve-ments in communications and transportation: the tele-graph, the railroad, the steamboat, and the steam- operatedprinting press. The steam press, in combination with inno-vations in papermaking, facilitated the mass production ofnewspapers, magazines, and books, while the railroad andsteamboat enabled their wide distribution. While theseadvances encouraged the proliferation of Latin and Greek

texts, both within and without the classroom, the newprinted media also undercut the relevance and authority ofelite classical republicanism.

The revolution in communications made political opin-ions and debates more widely available. This broadened theopportunities for political participation, as more peoplecould learn about candidates, issues, and the decisions ofgovernment. States responded by liberalizing suffragerequirements and providing for presidential electors to bechosen by popular vote. No longer was political leadershipto be confined to a leisure class whose members couldafford to serve without salary. Nor did the classical ration-ale for a property- based electorate carry conviction anylonger. Literacy replaced civic virtue as the desirable char-acteristic for a voter. Instead of a small- scale republic withthe restricted citizenry of classical city- states, a continentalempire with a mass electorate now seemed plausible, evendesirable. Political parties, which the classically influencedFounders had equated with factionalism and hoped to pre-vent, seized the opportunities provided by the printed media

At the turn of the 20th century, black schoolchildren gaze on Horatio Greenough’s once- controversial statue of George Washington cast as Zeus.

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to distribute their pamphlets and broadsides. Improvedmeans of transportation supported the parties’ travelingelection campaigns, whose songs, slogans, and paradesresembled those employed by revivalists and circuspromoters.

But classical learning and respect for the virtues it taughtdied hard. Displaced from politics and political philosophy,classicism found a new purpose in private life. Classicallearning became a vehicle for self- cultivation, for the pur-suit not of public influence or civic participation but of per-sonal perfection. Thus, the place of the ancient languages ina liberal education could be, and was, reaffirmed. Toward theend of the 19th century, the ancient languages came toshare with modern languages a new category, “humanities,”so named because they nurtured the student’s humanity andhelped realize his potential.

The Greek and Roman classics have occupied a place indefiningAmerican culture exceeded in importance only bythe Enlightenment and Christianity. The first overt challengeto their primacy in higher education came with the land-mark Morrill Act of 1862, which established federally sub-sidized land- grant colleges for the study of agriculture andengineering. But the general de- emphasis of classics in theU.S. educational system after the Civil War was a broad phe-nomenon. Nor was it occasioned simply by the rise of nat-ural science. Carl J. Richard perceptively argues that it wasa consequence of a declining confidence in human reasonand virtue that diminished respect for the ancient writersand the heroes they celebrated. Moral relativism undercuttrust in the standards the classical authors had longembodied.

Study of the ancient languages and literature remainedimportant in American higher and secondary education forabout a century after classical republicanism began to loseits relevance to the American political system. As late as1900, half the students in U.S. public high schools were tak-ing Latin; then began a long, gradual decline. Classics hadalways had something of an elite image; after all, classicalknowledge was the hallmark of gentility. But in 20th-century America, elitism came to seem like an accusationone needed to deny. Parochial and private schools main-tained the classical standards longer than most public ones,but much of the incentive for Catholic schools to do so wasremoved in the 1960s, when the Mass ceased to be cele-brated in Latin.

But all is not lost. Despite their curricular marginaliza-

tion, many great works of classical civilization are still read,though now mostly in translation. The texts of Plato, Aris-totle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Homer, Virgil, and the Athen-ian playwrights are still studied in courses on literature, his-tory, and philosophy. While we accord them less authoritythan Americans did a century and a half ago, we still holdthe conviction that the ancient classics have enduring worthas sources of instruction and inspiration.

As they did in the 19th century, today the Greeks seemto speak to us more profoundly than the Romans, havingoriginated many of the intellectual institutions we increas-ingly value as characteristically American: democratic pol-itics, natural science, and free inquiry, to name a few. In arecent memoir, Garry Wills looked back over his own clas-sical education, which culminated in a PhD at Yale. “Learn-ing classical Greek is the most economical intellectualinvestment one can make,” he wrote. “On many things thatmight interest one— law and politics, philosophy, oratory,history, lyric poetry, epic poetry, drama— there will be con-stant reference back to the founders of those forms in ourcivilization.”

T here are still those among us who defend the valueof classical learning. Ridgeview Classical Schools, agroup of public charter schools in Fort Collins, Col-

orado, defines their mission this way: “So important has clas-sical education been in the history of the West that it wouldonly be a slight exaggeration to say that the march of civi-lization has paralleled the vibrancy of classical schools.” AtRidgeview schools, Latin is mandatory starting in the sev-enth grade, and English itself is taught as a classical lan-guage. The schools have so many applicants that admissionis by lottery.

Ridgeview Classical does not seem to me merely aneccentric holdout against modern trends in education. I didnot myself enjoy the benefit of a classical education, thoughI studied Greek for a while as a gateway to the New Testa-ment. But in learning about the history of classical educa-tion in the United States, I have come to respect many of theideals for which it has so long stood, to believe that they tran-scend the limitations of time and place, and to hope for theirperpetuation. The neglect of classics in our educationalcurriculum has been a loss for our civilization. It is not sim-ply the ancient languages themselves but the spirit in whichthey are studied that has value for students today. ■