In the latest book I am reading, by Albert Jay Nock (The Theory of Education in the United States -1931) he explains that the Great Tradition (the pedagogy before 1890) had no curriculum for ‘English,’ to my surprise. That is to say, there were no English Studies. The idea of it in that time, and prior to, was completely absurd. Nock had this to say on the matter.
“With regard to "courses in English," I suspect that if you have not already done some such thing, there is a surprise in store for you when you make an estimate of the number of them that our institutions offer annually. I suggest that you look into the matter, and meanwhile I shall not anticipate your findings, being desirous that they should make their own impression on you and carry their own intimations. I therefore say only that there are a great many such courses, whereas forty years ago no such thing was known. Why should this be so? Forty years ago, our English-speaking students learned English quite informally; it was our own tongue, we were bred to a native idiomatic use of it, such a use as none but a native can ever possibly acquire. To say that English was not taught in our higher institutions means merely that everybody taught it. No matter what the stated subject under discussion might be, if we expressed ourselves inaccurately, loosely, unidiomatically, we heard about it at once and on the spot, and in terms that forcibly suggested a greater carefulness in the future.
As for English literature, it was our literature, our concern with it was proprietary, everything in it was open to us, and the critical judgment, the standards of taste and discrimination that we applied to it, were such as had been bred in us by our long acquaintance with the literatures of Greece and Rome. No one dreamed of teaching English literature; indeed, I do not see how it can be effectively taught in any formal fashion, how a really competent acquaintance with it can be brought about in any other way than the way by which it was brought about in us.”[Emphasis mine]
This had never actually occurred to me, but it does make perfect sense. The fact that we use the English language natively, thus its usage and perfection would be acquired over time within the framework of any subject matter, as other subjects are conveyed in our native tongue. So to have a class specifically for English, in essence, is a complete waste of someone’s time. Nock goes on.
“Why, then, is it that "courses in English" should hold so large a place in the newest type of institutional organization? They do so for a very simple reason. Under the conditions that we have been describing, great masses of ineducable people come into our institutions. They must be kept there, and must nominally be busy with something or other as a pro forma justification for keeping them. Therefore something has to be found for them, to do that they can do, and this is a hard matter because they can do almost nothing. One thing they can do, albeit after a very poor fashion, is to read; that is to say, they can make their way more or less uncertainly down a printed page; and therefore "courses in English" have come into their present extraordinary vogue.”
Pretty hard hitting stuff, to say the least. Since a large number of, well –dummies infiltrate the learning “institutions,” they are given busywork to justify their presence, and consequently their diploma upon completion. Take note that one subject that English literature replaced was that of Greece and Rome. By contemporary standards, the significance of this is unrealized. Nock explains the importance.
“The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity; every department, I think, except one—music. This record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind's operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything. Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind; a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage-point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit's operations.”
Based on this clear logic, Greece and Rome should be the core subject-matter of any student at any level. The lessons of Greece and Rome are unparalleled in the breadth and scope, along with it an unbroken length of recorded history at their respective periods. I have to tell you; all throughout my schooling I had mere glimpses of Rome in passing, barely worth mentioning. I did, however, have at least one English class every year of school on and through college. It’s a sad realization, but one that must be made for an individual to correct. It further emphasizes the point that salvation in education cannot be made with an institution whose concept, and theory behind, is abject failure and unattainable. Nock’s central premise is that everyone is not educable. The system in place denies this truism, at the detriment of all other educable persons who enter it with the ineducable at their side. In it, they will find no education, only instruction. There is a world of difference between the two.
With all that said. A lesson from Rome.
Crime and Complicity by: Tim Case.
In case you are interested in reading Nock’s, The Theory of Education in the United States. It is available for free at Mises.org in PDF format, or you can buy a copy for ten dollars.
Travis
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