The mutual severity of judgment which we have here come upon, may also
forcibly bring home to us how really scarce a true liberal culture is.
We may detect in this mutual attitude, too, something of that narrow,
mediæval arrogance of caste, where a man began, according to the special
point of view of the speaker, with the scholar, the soldier, or the
nobleman. Little sense or appreciation is to be found in it for the
_common_ task of humanity, little feeling for the need of mutual
assistance in the great work of civilisation, little breadth of mind,
little truly liberal culture.
A knowledge of Latin, and partly, also, a knowledge of Greek, is still a
necessity for the members of a few professions by nature more or less
directly concerned with the civilisations of antiquity, as for lawyers,
theologians, philologists, historians, and generally for a small number
of persons, among whom from time to time I count myself, who are
compelled to seek for information in the Latin literature of the
centuries just past.[118] But that all young persons in search of a
higher education should pursue for this reason Latin and Greek to such
excess; that persons intending to become physicians and scientists
should come to the universities defectively educated, or even
miseducated; and that they should be compelled to come only from schools
that do _not_ supply them with the proper preparatory knowledge is going
a little bit too far.
* * * * *
After the conditions which had given to the study of Latin and Greek
their high import had ceased to exist, the traditional curriculum,
naturally, was retained. Then, the different effects of this method of
education, good and bad, which no one had thought of at its
introduction, were realised and noted. As natural, too, was it that
those who had strong interests in the preservation of these studies,
from knowing no others or from living by them, or for still other
reasons, should emphasise the _good_ results of such instruction. They
pointed to the good effects as if they had been consciously aimed at by
the method and could be attained only through its agency.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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