Is classical education dead?

Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez Tracy Lee Simmons, a National Review contributor, is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He holds a master's degree from Oxford in the classics and is author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin. Portions of this interview appear in the current issue of The National Catholic Register. Kathryn Jean Lopez: When you write about classical education you mean more than learning enough Latin to help with the SATs. What is a classical education? Tracy Lee Simmons: This was the Humanist's education, in the sense in which Erasmus and Thomas More were Humanists. A classical education used to mean simply a curriculum based upon Greek and Latin. Of course, that curriculum also included math, history, and literature, but they were secondary; the two ancient languages were primary. Greek and Latin were what made the curriculum classical, nothing else. Unfortunately, as I say in the book, a classical education can mean lots of ...  more