Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin » (2nd Edition)

Tracy Lee Simmons is Director of Hillsdale College’s Dow Program in American Journalism. He holds a master’s degree in classics from Oxford.

Discussions of educational reform often involve windy talk of a "return to the classics," but as Tracy Lee Simmons notes, rarely do would-be reformers go so far as to advocate a return to education in the classical languages themselves. In this concise and elegant brief, Simmons traces the historical trajectory of Greek and Latin education, giving especial attention to the crucial importance such an education has had for the advocates of humanism-in its Renaissance and descendent form-and the Anglo-American world. His persuasive witness to the unique, now all-but-forgotten formative power of an education in Greek and Latin constitutes a bracing reminder of the genuine aims of a truly humanistic education.

Washington Post

Simmons's fascinating tour through the pedagogical history of the classics may be his chief contribution to the debat.