I Wonder What They DO Teach Them at These Schools?

But in general it is fair to say that few Americans now know anything about Classics and could not care less.  Yet every American should care: the demise of Classics means more than the inevitable implosion of an inbred academic discipline, more than the disappearance of one more bookosaurus here and there.  We are not talking here of the death of Leisure Studies, Recreation Management, or Educational Philosophy. For chained to this sinking bureaucracy called Classics, the academic discipline, are the ideas, the values, the vision of Classical Greece and Rome …  These are the ideas and values that have shaped and defined all of Western civilization, a vision of life that has ironically come under increasing attack here in the West just as its mutated form is metastasizing throughout the globe.
– Victor Davis Hanson & John Heath

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One of the most haunting segments that I have heard on NPR was while listening to the show Marketplace.  It has stuck with me ever since.  The host, Kai Ryssdal explained how he had interviewed economist and author of the book, Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, who had made the assertion that parents ought to pay cash to their children in order to bribe them to do their homework.

Mr. Ryssdal next called a mother who had decided to try this.  The conversation proceeded as follows:

Concerned mother: “I’m always looking for ways to motivate the kids because they don’t seem to be really excited about school themselves.”

Mr. Ryssdal: “Shocking, shocking.”

Concerned mother: “Yeah, it is.  So I thought that, well my son had two books to read over the summer – Great Expectations and The Odyssey …”

Mr. Ryssdal: “So how much were you going to pay them?”

Concerned mother: “… so I figured twenty dollars a book was reasonable.”

“Oh man,” Mr. Ryssdal quipped, “See, I’m not going to read The Odyssey for twenty dollars.”  

Kai Ryssdal is a graduate from Emory University of Atlanta, Georgia, and a former staff officer of the Pentagon and member of the U.S. Foreign Service.

“So tell me what happened,” he asked her.

Concerned mother: “So what happened was, he finished Great Expectations maybe four days ago, five days ago, and then he started The Odyssey two days ago.  And I just have to point out that school starts tomorrow … and I had some different ideas about what I would have done if I was doing it over again.”

Mr. Ryssdal: “Like what?”

Concerned mother: “Well, I would have offered him more than twenty dollars.”

Mr. Ryssdal: “Yeah, you got that right!”

This unfortunate mother then explained that the bribe would have had to be considerably more in order to try to get her son to read a book like The Odyssey.  Why?  Because, she said, it was five hundred pages long and, besides, it was written two thousand years ago.  Mr Ryssdal heartily agreed with her.

Her son was fourteen years old.  Not that long ago, seven- and eight-year-olds read and memorized The Odyssey in the original Greek.

Must we be dumb it down this much?  What kind of citizens do we currently create in our schools?

Dear Mr. Ryssdal, concerned mother & school teachers,

There are many underprivileged children out there of all races, colors, and creeds without real education who would sacrifice and pay dearly in order to be able to sit down, read, and study a poem like Homer’s The Odyssey.  Such treasures are not given to everyone.  If your children need to be paid to read Homer’s adventures of Odysseus because they think it dull, then something has gone fundamentally wrong.

Your children are not receiving the formative education that belongs to free and educated persons.  We can do better than this.

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– Victor Davis Hanson & John Heath, Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, 1998, pg. xxiii

– Kai Ryssdal, “Bribing your kids to study: Does it work?,” Marketplace, August 14, 2012