Nick
Catalano is a TV writer/producer and Professor of Literature
and Music at Pace University. He reviews books and music for
several journals and is the author of Clifford
Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter,
New
York Nights: Performing, Producing and Writing in Gotham
, A
New Yorker at Sea,, Tales
of a Hamptons Sailor and his most recent book,
Scribble
from the Apple. For Nick's reviews, visit his
website: www.nickcatalano.net
The title of this article is hopelessly trite and I, for one,
would immediately cast off reading more scribbling on failures
in American colleges and universities. But the results of
the recent presidential election have revealed new lows in
the thought processes of millions of citizens and, certainly,
one of the faults lies with the deterioration of classical
standards at institutes of higher education.
In the many
decades of university teaching in New York, I have been privy
to steady erosion of requirements in subjects which for millennia
have proven to be necessary for meaningful mind training and
development. These subjects can be collectively grouped as
the Liberal Arts; a term that has unfortunately become somewhat
timeworn.
A model
classical curriculum must include the following : Philosophy
-- a detailed historical examination of the thinking of ancient
classical thinkers: Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Cicero, Marcus
Aurelius, Confucius, Avicenna, and later figures Descartes,
Leibnitz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Hume, Locke, Gandhi and others.
Literature -- studious readings of figures such as Homer,
Sappho,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, and later writers such as Dickens, Dostoevsky,
Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Baudelaire . . .I have omitted
many other greats. History -- exposure to Herodotus, Thucydides,
Tacitus and Gibbon. Fine Arts/Architecture -- countless geniuses
as Phidias, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Velasquez, Van Gogh, Picasso.
Gehry. Music -- Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy
and Duke Ellington. Obviously, I’ve left out dozens
of luminaries. 
There needs
to be training in rhetoric, foreign languages, classical science
and mathematics with elimination of worthless survey courses.
Students must study Physics from Archimedes to Einstein and
have knowledge of Newton and Plank. Similar education must
be had in Chemistry and evolutionary Biology. For this to
be accomplished mathematical training must progress from Euclidean
geometry, to classical Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus.
All of this
must sound hilarious to students, professors and administrators
everywhere. How could such education occur within the framework
of present day college degree structures? One answer might
be a rigorous schedule of approximately 20 credits a semester
with 1, 2, and 3 credit courses leading to 160 credit diploma.
Included in the curriculum would be 18-25 credits in the student’s
major. Classes would be held from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. 5 days
a week with little time for lunch. In addition, students would
be expected to find time for physical exercise and maybe a
part-time job to help pay tuition.
Incredulous
as such a schedule may seem to the vast majority of Americans,
it is important to note that analogous curricula such as I
have described exist everywhere from China and India, to Argentina
and Africa. Unfortunately, few such programs are possible
in the countless mediocre colleges in America, many of which
should close their doors. They are a waste of time and prohibitively
costly.
Obsession
with dorm comforts, dietary choices, and social engagement
are presently uppermost in the minds of students and even
parents everywhere. One of the results is that a centuries
old classical education (such as the one outlined above) which
would insure greater ability to evaluate political issues
and leaders, is all but absent in America, The startling fact
that tens of millions of Americans mindlessly just voted for
the deceitful, incompetent and narcissistic incumbent Trump
certainly reflects to a great degree the absence of classically
trained minds and the educational curricula needed to train
them.
It wasn’t
always that way. A new book from Pulitzer winner Thomas E.
Ricks entitled What America's Founders Learned from the
Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country traces
the intense classical learning that Adams, Jefferson, and
Madison experienced at colleges that were in early stages
of development. These early U.S. presidents received profound
exposure to and became heavily influenced by the classical
figures noted above in philosophy, politics, history, literature
and art.
Some brief
examples: At Harvard, Adams became a Cicero scholar receiving
a freshman prize for his study of the great orator’s
political battles with Catiline. At William & Mary Jefferson
eschewed Plato’s Republic while embracing Aristotle’s
Politics. At Princeton, Madison absorbed the ancient
classicists through the prism of 18th century enlightenment
writers such as Montesquieu, writing scholarly papers on his
Spirit of the Laws. In short, our founding fathers
scrutinized most of the classical and renaissance figures
I noted above with a depth unheard of in most present day
classrooms.
Ricks provides
us with an anecdote illustrating an early example of the deterioration
of classical intellectuality and aesthetic sensibility in
political leaders. He notes that John Quincy Adams, a former
professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, exhibited disdain
at Andrew Jackson’s anti-intellectuality. When Jackson
was invited to Harvard to accept an honorary degree Adams
refused to attend, recording in his diary that he did not
desire to witness Harvard’s “disgrace in conferring
her highest literary honours upon a barbarian who could not
write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own
name.”
Of course
Adams’ comments reflects the major flaws inherent in
many intellectual circles -- pomposity, pretense and pedantry
-- all anti-intellectual proclivities. And it must be noted
that there have been many political leaders who have not had
rigorous classical educations been but have served the country
quite well.
But aside
from the education of political leaders, as noted initially,
the total absence of rigorous schooling in much of the American
populace is certainly responsible for much of the thoughtlessness,
prejudice, irrationality, impulsivity and acrimony displayed
during the recent presidential campaign.
Lest I leave
readers with the thesis that classical education is a magic
formula for perfection in life and society an important caveat
needs to be noted. The institution of slavery was rationalized
as necessary by none other than Aristotle in the 4th century
B.C. and it wasn’t until 1814 at the Congress of Vienna
that classically trained European minds began abolishing it.
And as we all know, it took a civil war half a century later
to emancipate slaves in the United States. Accordingly, even
this best tested classical tradition in understanding reality
has had its shortcomings. And systemic racism remains a contemporary
problem.
Still, education
along classical lines lies unchallenged as the best hope for
the development of intellect and growth of wisdom. In our
own day science and technology have given this tradition impetus
in some instances. Hopefully, it can safeguard human survival
and improve life for populations still suffering the ignorant
consequences of barbarian vacuity.
