Climbing Parnassus - Quotes for Discussion
I'm starting a series of discussions on selected quotations from Tracy Lee Simmons's Climbing Parnassus. Please feel free to post your thoughts and to create new topics with quotes that struck you.
Here's a quote to get us started:
"Classics must make a difference not just in the way we think, but in the way we live." (p. 24)
And here's another that may shed light on the question:
"The student is 'rightly trained in respect of pleasures and pains, so as to hate what ought to be hated, right from the beginning to the very end, and to love what ought to be loved.' This isn't just reading and writing and counting. This is paideia." (p. 56; the internal quote is from Plato)
Thoughts?
-Drew
Thoughts on this....
I wonder to what extent the pursuit of a classical education requires a rejection of the larger culture -- television, rock music, etc. -- the huge number of distractions in modern life. I've read Alan Bloom's comments on how rock music is antithetical to higher thought, and many feel that television viewing has similar mind-deadening results. What aspects of modernity do you feel are at odds with a classical outlook?
I was just reading Richard Weaver's essay on Milton, where he analyzes a sentence of Milton's that is 327 words long! Weaver notes that few now have the attention span to read such a sentence, let alone write one.
Best wishes,
Jennifer
Best wishes,
Jennifer
ponderings
I noticed many years ago, that my son was a lot worse in behaviour, when he watched TV for any amount of time. It caused him to lose his attention so much easier... his attention span was 1/2 that when he did not watch any TV. So I cut back on the TV viewing :)
i don't know that it is specifically the pursuit of a Classical education that requires the rejection of the larger culture, than it is rather the pursuit of a good education that requires it.
That being said, considering the heavy emphasis of reading in both the LCE and Neo Classical methods, would suggest that, at the very least, a restriction of 'modern cultural influences' is necessary. Perhaps it means that the use of the modern culture should be to emphasize the classical things we study... it is nice when I can say to James... "Look, recognise him? That's Mercury... we called him Hermes!" and he knows the character!
~Rachel~
SAHM to James (6) and Lenore (2)
A thought
To draw a correlation to Christianity, LCE isn't a "smart factory" any more than the Church is a "salvation factory;" by their fruits we shall know them. If the student does not internalize his education to point where it affects all aspects of his life, then he hasn't learned anything truly useful.
Exactly!
It's easy to see the intellectual benefits of LCE. But one of the key benefits can't be quantified by test scores, college enrollments, or scientific studies: the effect that the content of the curriculum can have on the emotional and moral life of the child.
Andrew Kern defines classical education as "the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty by means of the liberal arts." If this form of education doesn't nourish to soul as well as exercise the mind, then we run the risk of turning out evil geniuses rather than wise and virtuous persons. Surely the world has enough evil geniuses already!
This is why I believe that classical education can't be reduced to a method (as in the Sayers Trivium) that can be applied to any and all content equally. The ancients saw education as a means of enculturation, of "handing on" their civilization to the next generation - "handing on" being the root meaning of the word "tradition." So while it's true that LCE teaches children to think, it also teaches them to feel. It teaches them to admire virtue and hate vice. Therein lies one of its greatest gifts.
-Drew
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"Hardly any lawful price would seem to me too high for what I have gained by being
made to learn Latin and Greek. —C. S. Lewis
***
Here's another quote...
that speaks to this issue. This one's from Robert Spencer's talk "Classical Education in the Contemporary World," available from Kolbe Academy.
Sound educational methods are well-known; they've changed very little from ancient Greece to our own day: St. Ignatious and other great educators from before the time of Christ and after all agree that if a child is exposed to what is excellent, the child will be attracted to what is excellent. He will imitate it. For that matter, expose a child to mediocrity and self-justification, and he will imitate that too. [...] As education is largely accomplished by imitation, exposing a child to the greatest will train his own soul, mind, and will to be great.
-Drew
***
"Hardly any lawful price would seem to me too high for what I have gained by being
made to learn Latin and Greek. —C. S. Lewis
***
Charlotte Masson's criteria for books for children
I got this from the Ambleside year 0 book list
"There are many Picture Book lists to be found, but Charlotte Mason felt that children would be better with only a few wonderful picture books than a lot of merely entertaining ones."
and the criteria for picking books for dc
"Text should be literary to prepare children for the challenging books they'll be using for school, and cultivate a delight in beautiful names. Children should be discouraged from developing a taste for easy books that will undermine their capacity to read classics later. Books should be selected with the goal of decreasing dependence on pictures, and relying more on the imagination to envision pictures in the mind from the text.
Illustrations should "have a refining, elevating effect upon our coarser nature" and bring us into the "world of beauty" while helping our children develop an affinity for, an attraction to, the beautiful, the lovely, the pure, the refining--because "education is concerned to teach him what pictures to delight in."
Stories should have the noble, beautiful, inspiring kind of living ideas that CM espoused, including "the great human relationships, relationships of love and service, of authority and obedience, of reverence and pity and neighbourly kindness; relationships to kin and friend and neighbour, to 'cause' and country and kind, to the past and the present."
I think the original quotes
I think the original quotes above are one the most central element of a classical education--educating for virtue, so that "right thinking" becomes "right acting." Every classical author I have read has made this same point--that education is for the purpose of making a person "good" rather than "intelligent," and "wise" rather than "full or knowledge" or "well-read."
So how does that look in practice? I like David Hicks' perspective on this, which is both faithful to the classical tradition and adaptable to a Christian worldview. The learner is presented a picture (which becomes sharper and clearer as more material is read and studied) of an "ideal" person to emulate. We learn to admire virtues because we admire the people who embody those virtues, and to abhor vice because the practioners of vice are abhorrent. Our values may or may not be the same as those of the classical educators, so our "ideal" may come from other sources, but the basic principle is the same.
I think I *get it*
I think it's on a par with the 'learning from history' ideal. We look to the past to try and learn from it... well the ideals of the 'classics education' are well worth striving for...
It seems that they suggest that the teaching of classics is a lifestyle choice more than an educational choice, that training a child in the classics, gives them a perspective not everyone has... maybe even advantages in an area.
In my experience, the teaching of the classics is a great thing more because of the advantages it gives a child in the ability to perceive some of the references out there, in the real world, that are frequently made, regarding myths, legends, historical events and so on. Perhaps a knowledge of the Roman government structure, allows a child to see where our founding fathers got their influence from, and even to understand the complexities of our own government more.
I am sure there are more, better examples out there ;)
~Rachel~
SAHM to James (6) and Lenore (2)