A Classical Education?

As the clouds came out again over Melbourne, Peter Rose, Eliot Weinberger, Barry Hill and Ian Morris gathered to discuss the influence of the classics on contemporary writing.

What is a classic, anyway? When I was at school, classical societies and cultures were those of ancient Greece and Rome. Morris, who is Willard Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University, described a redefinition of ‘classic’ that was taking place in scholarly and educational circles: ‘It would be silly to carry on acting like they did in the 19^th century, when there was a real focus on Western culture.’ Where Western civilisation courses used to be ubiquitous, they have now have been replaced by world history courses. Of course, this means that ‘there’s going to be less of a focus on Greek and Roman literature – but that’s not such a bad thing’.

Classics do still play a part in modern literature, poet and historian (among other things) Hill reminded us, as he had been reminded last week at a series of events featuring philosopher Raimond Gaita. Plato features in Gaita’s work, as does Socrates – Gaita clearly has a passion for ‘the examined life’. As the attendees discussed Gaita’s Romulus, My Father and Gaita’s new book, Hill realised they were engaging in the ritual of rendering a new book as a classic – by recalling the classics that helped shape it, and lauding it in terms of the classics we admire. A paradox of the ‘classic’ occurred to him: the classic is there to be used and reused (and abused), but is also sacred, unique.

It’s universal that every culture venerates its ancestors, said a jetlagged Weinberger (‘One is stupid, but when jetlagged, one has an excuse for one’s stupidity.’) ‘It’s hard to think of any culture that doesn’t’; perhaps we’re at a moment where the poets have lost the past and the classics have dropped out, in a nod to postmodernism.

An audience question suggested that history is being poorly covered in schools; did the panellists find this depressing? Morris didn’t, and said he didn’t worry about it because history is being covered abundantly on television and being watched like never before, although the coverage was perhaps not what a historian would choose to watch.

The Cameron government has made huge cuts to university funding, too, Rose said, raising the question of what sort of education should be produced under financial constraints. Morris agreed there was a push towards career-oriented disciplines, such as finance, and that the lack of funds prompted reflection: is there any point to a humanist education? But reflection needn’t be so defeatist, Morris said – perhaps humanists aren’t making an attempt to teach relevant content that interests people.

At session’s end, Weinberger revisited the idea of what defines a classic, pointing again to the expansion of this idea of what is classic: not just Greece and Rome, but also artefacts from Asia, and Aboriginal culture, closer to home. ‘The ancient is always lurking under the parking lot and it has an unpredictable way of resurfacing.’