From my Substack article, “Putting the Wildness Back Into Classical Education“:
We need to get into great literature the same way we get into the mountains, through immersing ourselves in the entire experience. And that means experiencing the same world as Beowulf and King Arthur—the world where we get cold and hungry, where we enjoy friendships over a fire, where we embody the virtues of hospitality and sharing. It also means limiting the technologies that buffer us from direct experience of reality.
One of my critiques of the modern classical education movement is that it often treats the Great Books as if they can be unbundled from the entire experience of reality and then dished up as a product. Classic literature and languages are reduced to merely a delivery vehicle for goods that are understood instrumentally. The classics become simply an academic subject that can be disengaged from a broader experience of reality, including the holistic integration of body, mind, and soul. This rationalistic approach to texts means that the modern student is not actually invited to inhabit the same world as the authors, artists, and sages being studied. If one were studying a text in a different language, one would need to learn the tongue; similarly, to truly understand the Great Books even in translation, we need to enter into their world by realigning ourselves with a correct relationship to physical reality.
Can you really appreciate Beowulf if you don’t know what mead tastes like or have never got dirty? Can you really enter into Odysseus’s struggles if you’ve never tasted goat’s cheese, felt the splash of the salty sea on your face, or been in a situation where you depend on others for your survival? Can you really appreciate Herbert, Wordsworth, or Hopkins if you are so overloaded with homework that stillness is simply an idea you read about in Josef Pieper but never actually experience? And what is the point of learning how to say the Latin equivalent of “fish,” “cow,” or “chicken,” if you have never actually seen a live fish, touched a cow, or observed the comedic seriousness of chickens?
It’s time for classical education to stop being so sanitized and unbundled from the rich and unpredictable world assumed by the authors of the Great Books. That might mean spending more time in the mountains than in the classroom.
