Responding to Why Cicero?, reader Melainie sent the following email:
Having studied Cicero --- in high school, for God’s sake, not college --- I learned what you wrote. But I also learned when I went to college in 1957 that I had been taught in 1953-1957 the same thing that I would be taught in 1957-1961. The end result was that even with two scholarships, I was bored out of my skull and dropped out. I was not allowed to take higher level Latin and read Ovid, Livy, heavier Cicero; there was no place for my free wheeling quest for knowledge.
Sacred Heart Academy in DC almost lost her accreditation in mid-1950s because we spent an entire year (my junior year) learning about Communism, Fascism and Socialism --- from the writings of Marx, Lenin, Engels, Mao, Hitler --- the theory being you can’t fight what you don’t know. I learned world history and how American ideals and ideas were a natural progression of the authors you speak. I was also encouraged to read their correspondence, most of which was as if they were speaking rather than writing, to the people addressed. The correspondence of Adams, Washington, TR, Jefferson, Bayard, Hamilton made these men human and therefore their ideas were very real.
Basically, you are talking about how I was encouraged to read Locke, translate Cicero and Virgil (we did the first six books of the Aeneid in senior year, with excerpts from 6-12, such as the description of Turnus) and because I did so much in one sitting, I became engrossed in these stories and went forward, on my own! I was rewarded by the teachers by acknowledgement of my personal initiative, not by grades so much as personal acknowledgement, personal encouragement.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Marvelous article that sets out clearly what we have lost in education, based on a very basic, singular piece of learning. This article demonstrates one of my favorite life principles: ripples. The ‘rock’ was Cicero/Locke/Jefferson/Banks; the ‘ripples’ were the fitting of these ideas into my life. Love them ripples!!!
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