Independent Institute POLICY REPORT Is it Time for a “490 B.C. Project”? High Schoolers Need to Know Our Classical Heritage By Morgan E. Hunter, Williamson M. Evers, and Victor Davis Hanson CONTENTS In recent decades, K-12 education policy has • Introduction been roiled by both the “Math Wars,” discovery • Part 1: The Classical World in American learning versus explicit instruction as the best way Education to teach math;1 and the “Reading Wars,” phonics • Part 2: The Ancient World under the versus whole language as the best way to teach Common Core 2 • Part 3: Conclusions and Recommendations children to read. Our current report finds that • Appendix: Errors in Another a new, extremely significant education issue has Common-Core-Inspired Textbook emerged—and that educators, parents, and citi- • Notes zens in general need to familiarize themselves with it, because the fight over this topic may be the most INTRODUCTION important of all the previous cultural fault lines. When Americans knew classical history, they could The issue is the systematic neglect of the content of reach beyond partisan differences by drawing on history and literature in favor of reading skills— the shared roots of our civilization. American stu- how to analyze a paragraph of text in a preconceived dents once learned, for example, about the Greek mode, with no concern with the actual content or victory at Marathon in 490 B.C. This kept Greece meaning of the work—and also the overemphasis from being swallowed up by the Persian Empire and on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and ushered in the Golden Age of Athenian democracy Mathematics) and the corresponding neglect of the which, for all its shortcomings, was a pathbreaking humanities. achievement. Democratic Athens, counterbalanced This report argues that instruction in the foun- by Sparta’s tripartite system, led to broad-based dation of the humanities is an essential and coequal polities and ultimately the Roman Republic. From complement to teaching the foundations of STEM there we trace a clear line to Magna Carta and the and that the foundation of the humanities in the Renaissance republics, to the Enlightenment, and West is the history, literature, and philosophy of ultimately to the American Founding in the years Classical Greece and Rome. (This, of course, is not around 1776. to denigrate the other civilizations of roughly that Without classical knowledge, Americans same era—Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern— are likely to misconstrue the achievements of that have also profoundly influenced the world, but 1776—not to mention other significant historical rather that Greco-Roman civilization was directly moments (as evidenced in recent inconclusive con- ancestral to our own and the antecedent that eluci- tentions over the events of 1619). Unfortunately, dates many of our current political, economic, and contemporary school curricula leave students with cultural traditions. Just as a biography starts with major gaps in their knowledge of classical history the childhood of its subject, so does the study of a and the humanities more broadly. Copyright © 2020 by Independent Institute September, 2020 www.independent.org 2 | Independent Institute Is it Time for a “490 B.C. Project”? civilization.) (that is, K-8) and secondary education (four years of Generations of Americans have also rightly seen high school and four years of undergraduate college). a basic knowledge of classical civilization as nec- The goal of elementary education was universality— essary for full participation in the political life of that is, to provide the basic and shared knowledge our country, because the American Republic owes needed by all citizens. Secondary education, at least so much of its foundational ideas to the cultural until recent years, was intended for the more aca- examples and constitutional models provided by demically inclined. Over two centuries, the details ancient Greece and Rome. These foundational of what all citizens were expected to know about the ideas should be made available to all citizens. In ancient world changed, particularly after World War addition, the ancient Greek and Roman worlds I, with the advent of “social studies.” Likewise, the supply the intellectual foundations for virtually all classical content of secondary education changed as college-level discussions in the humanities in the colleges evolved from training clerics to providing a West. Currently, and rather shockingly, a chrono- liberal education in “the humanities” for gentlemen logical straightjacket confines discussion of the and currently to educating roughly one-half of all Greco-Roman classical world to middle school in Americans based on initial “general education” and most states (grade six in California, for example), “core” requirements. when it should also be taught in high schools We conclude Part I with an overview of the actual to prepare students for citizenship as well as for situation today in Northern California: what is college humanities. (Some states, such as Texas, do taught about classical civilization in state-approved teach the classical world in high school, but only as K-8 textbooks; the curricula of local high schools part of a class on the “World History” of all civiliza- and the International Baccalaureate Program; and tions, from the Paleolithic to Putin. Typically only what incoming freshmen appear to know at three two or three weeks are spent on Greece and Rome.) San Francisco Bay Area universities (Stanford As we shall see in this report, teaching the classi- University, University of California, Berkeley, and cal world in the United States has declined steadily Santa Clara University). Unfortunately we find that since before World War II— partially because of the current public school curriculum shortchanges the past convictions by many university classicists students in both the classical foundations of the that the entire field must be tied to difficult mas- American experiment in government and the Gre- tery of Latin and Greek, which imposes a signifi- co-Roman foundations of the humanities. cant burden on the modern student. Fortunately, Part II covers the effect that the most recent over the last fifty years, a cornucopia of excellent education reform movement—the Common Core translations has emerged of virtually all significant initiative—has had on the teaching of the classical classical texts, and indeed are exclusively used in world. We find that its emphasis on reading skills the British GCSE and A-level courses in classical instead of content has had a negative effect on the civilization. Latin and Greek are, of course, still already-dubious trajectories of current textbooks, required in order to train a new generation of pro- at least in those reading assignments that have been fessional classicists; however, they are not needed produced under the new regime. We present the when learning the classical foundations of citizen- clearest evidence of this influence by examining ship and the humanities. two textbooks written by the same author for the In Part I of this report, we will explore the evo- same publisher, one before the Common Core lution of how the classical world has been taught in adoption, the other after. We find that the post– the United States up to the present. Throughout this Common Core book is significantly worse in both long period—until recent decades—there has been a coherence and readability, and that the changes clear separation in the goals of elementary education to the old text pertaining to “reading skills” have Copyright © 2020 by Independent Institute September, 2020 www.independent.org 3 | Independent Institute Is it Time for a “490 B.C. Project”? introduced a significant number of errors. courses are taught entirely in English translation, In Part III we present our fundamental con- making it unnecessary to master Latin and Greek clusions and recommendations. We conclude that to receive a sound grounding in the humanities. teaching the literature, history, and philosophy of We also confront a major issue that has emerged Classical Greece and Rome in both elementary in recent decades: can treating Greco-Roman education and high school remains an essential antiquity as profoundly important to present day foundation both for citizenship in our republic multiethnic Americans be reconciled with our in the current era and for university study of the commitment to intellectual and cultural diversity? humanities. It is thus a necessary complement to We argue that it most certainly can and, in fact, teaching the foundations of STEM. We also con- enhances the idea of diversity within a common front head-on one of the most vexatious issues: culture. whether an adequate knowledge of the classics In the course of researching this report, we requires an understanding of Greek and Latin. interviewed more than a dozen classics professors Our conclusion is that in the twenty-first century, at Stanford University, the University of California, this is no longer the case: as previously remarked, Berkeley, and the Jesuit Santa Clara University. We excellent translations exist of almost all significant also consulted with officials and former officials in classical texts, and there are readable and reliable the California Department of Education as well as texts of classical history and culture. several teachers of grades six through twelve who Our concrete recommendations are these: we have taught the ancient world. The authors would think that the current sixth-grade