The links post, Patrick writes, is an underrated artifact. One of the reasons for starting this blog was that I was interested in following the current debate around the classics.
Here’s the New York Times:
On top of the problems facing the humanities as a whole — vanishing class sizes caused by disinvestment, declining prominence and student debt — classics was also experiencing a crisis of identity. Long revered as the foundation of “Western civilization,” the field was trying to shed its self-imposed reputation as an elitist subject overwhelmingly taught and studied by white men
And so I want to start collecting assorted links around the current debate around the classics (and perhaps about the issues with liberal education in general).
- Point/counterpoint the Chronicle of Higher Education: A New Path for Classics vs. No, Classics Shouldn’t ‘Burn’. (I find it interesting when post URLs show something different to the final product — the post is titled “A New Path for Classics” but the post URL suggests its original title was “If Classics Doesn’t Change, Burn it Down.”)
- #DisruptTexts has a January 2021 update.
- Saving the Classics from Blindness.
- Nothing new under the sun: we were debating the primacy of the classics back in the 18th century. (Also includes a fair critique of the Great Books curriculum.) “Even before the founding of the U.S., this humanist conception of higher education had many detractors. Why, critics wondered, must educated Americans learn the classical languages? And why did the prescribed curricula of the early American colleges provide comparatively scant attention to the natural and social sciences?”
- Don’t cancel Shakespeare.