Booklist: The Grammar of Our Civility

What is the opposite of Devolution Media? Evolution Media- that media: books, TV, movies, that are created to uplift and enoble, instead of denigrate.

Evolution media is also education. Most American students get out of high school and never open a book again. If they do go on to college, they get out of college and then never open a book again.

They're closing themselves off to worlds upon worlds of enjoyment.

The book below encourages the reinstallation of teaching the Classics in American education - learning Latin and Greek, and reading the great writers in those languages.

The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America
by Lee T. Pearcy
Baylor University Press, 2005

Description
Highly accessible, The Grammar of Our Civility avoids the exaggerated, gratuitous polemic, and lack of historical grounding that have vitiated previous popularizing efforts to make the case for the value of classical studies in contemporary US society. Wearing his immense learning lightly, Lee T. Pearcy cogently and eloquently sytnesizes a vast amount of previous scholarship to envision a new form of American classical education: one that reflects-much as European classical studies reflected European social realities and aspirations - the diverse, vibrant, intellectual environment and ethical ideals of our nation.

Table of Contents
Foreword
1. The Grammar of Our Civility
2. The American Dialect
3. Finis: Four Arguments Against the Classics
4. Prolegomena to a Pragmatic Claccicism
Notes
Works Cited
Idex

So okay, "Prolegomena to a Pragmatic Classicism" sounds rather more pretentious than accessible. I know what "vitiate" means but "Prolegomena" I had to look up. (It means "a preliminary discussion; introductory essay, as prefatory matter in a book; a prologue"). Well, so the author used one word, prolegomena, instead of two or three...

Well, the book is intended for the academic. And it's definitely written for a college-level education (which can be acquired throuh one attending college, or by one implementing an educational curriculum of one's own from home). And it's interesting.

A little bit more description from Amazon.com:

The pragmatic demands of American life have made higher education's sustained study of ancient Greece and Rome an irrelevant luxury--and this despite the fact that American democracy depends so heavily on classical language, literature, and political theory. In The Grammar of Our Civility, Lee T. Pearcy chronicles how this came to be. Pearcy argues that classics never developed a distinctly American way of responding to distinctly American social conditions. Instead, American classical education simply imitated European models that were designed to underwrite European culture. The Grammar of Our Civility also offers a concrete proposal for the role of classical education, one that takes into account practical expectations for higher education in twenty-first century America.

(We need this education, it's true, but we also need - somewhat more urgently, I would say - an education in the sciences. In math. Learning the classics though is a matter of memorization...learning math and science is much harder...