The Left Should Defend Classical Education
The great books aren’t just a collection of “dead white males,” and teaching or reading them isn’t elitist or Eurocentric. On the contrary, they are a treasure that should be made available and accessible to working-class people everywhere.
Statue of Aristotle at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. (salut_rai / Wikimedia Commons)
“Fuck George Orwell,” the student was saying. “And fuck his middle-class, British values.”
Teaching political writing at Brooklyn College, I’d (unoriginally) assigned Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English Language.” The student was incensed by Orwell’s hostility to words and expressions with Greek and Latin roots, which the twentieth-century English writer considered pretentious. For Orwell, such language was clutter crying out for Marie Kondo–like simplification. My student begged to differ.
“I took a class in classical literature,” he said.
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