The Classics and Democracy

Abstract

U NTIL bombs of Pearl Harbor obscured it and redirected educational thinking into urgent and immediate task of saving nation, a spirited controversy was in making, which had taken form of a challenge to prevailing trends in higher schools, actively promoted by a growing number of prominent educators and publicists. Precipitated, or at any rate accelerated, by Archibald MacLeish's now famous denunciation of America's intellectuals, the irresponsibles, a flood of critical articles appeared which probed for causes of our increasing national softness and loss of backbone-this was during years of neutrality and appeasementand which, in many instances, identified disintegrating virus as positivism and moral relativism. The blame for this loss of moral convictions rested, it seemed, with nation's educators, and with increasing frequency their neglect of liberal tradition as expressed in Greek and Latin classics was singled out as basic fallacy which had weakened our moral and intellectual fiber. The widely publicized views of Mr. Hutchins and Mr. Adler come to mind, as does also restoration, in keeping with their views, of classical tradition undertaken by St. John's College. Others sounding call back to law and testimony, were Miss Dorothy Thompson and Mr. Walter Lippman, former suggesting that we turn to Aristotle for an explanation of Fascism, while latter found that our current foot-loose educational practices compared most unfavorably with those of founders of republic, who had a moral and rational basis for their philosophy of freedom in classical tradition which they inherited. And still another critic, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, stated unequivocally that in following President Eliot from a prescribed classical curriculum to a varied curriculum of free electives higher education had lost its soul. Somehow, then, flabbiness of our democratic convictions seemed bound up with this reorientation in higher schools. The elective system with its ad hoc courses and its almost limitless freedom of choice was under fire as perhaps it has not been since early years of Eliot; and once again we were forced to ask ourselves whether, in our eagerness for intellectual freedom, we had not been behaving as irrationally as hero of Western thriller who