“The study of ancient Greek and Latin long ago vanished from most American classrooms, and with it has gone a special understanding of the values and virtues prized by Western civilization.”
— DANIEL WALKER HOWE, CLASSICAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA, THE WILSON QUARTERLY, 2011.
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IN “AMERICAN REPUBLICANISM: ROMAN IDEOLOGY IN THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION,” M.N.S. Sellers explains to us the classical curriculum the founders were steeped in, which itself gives us an insight as to the character and identity of the American. Imagine the depths our education system can reach. Imagine if that system made it crucial to mould the cosmopolitan mind, and the American student was taught, regardless of their class Spanish, in French, Latin and Ancient Greek. Things are only dead as much as you make them and abandon them, which is what has been done. This ideal of the American, though excluding certain peoples, was integral to the culture and the development of the American identity. A number of the American founders were classicists, and were trained and continued to train themselves in classical education, a characteristic of the early libertine, derived from European heritage and then continued through colonial education.
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