Words …

… In the Beginning .  .  . | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“The focus throughout is on the status of language”? This sounds like a wonderful course for a graduate student, but couldn’t an 18-year-old freshman, anxious to talk about the meaning of life, simply study Plato’s Apology or Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex without having to address “the perceived inadequacies and difficulties inherent in language”? The course’s focus on language is especially ironic given this introductory disclaimer: “Knowledge of Greek and Latin is not necessary, since all texts are in translation.”

The value of a classical education, as Albert Jay Nock pointed out, it that it produces a mind that is experienced by having come to know a long and living tradition. Whatever the idea of a university may be today, it is not the one John Henry Newman wrote of.