“First off, let me say that I like classical education. It’s a lot of fun reading what brilliant men of the past had to say, and it’s often illuminating to learn the origin of the ideas we all accept.

That said, I have a serious problem with groups who claim that studying the classics is a panacea for our (undeniable) educational malaise. We need better education, of course, but only a very narrow conception of education could conclude that our main goal should be to get kids to read Euclid.

Everyone knows that the Italian Renaissance was a time where classical scholarship was prized above nearly anything else. Therefore, we would expect the world’s most brilliant men to come from that time period, right? Wrong. They actually wrote very little worth reading. They were so focused on studying the past that they forgot to think for themselves. It took the anti-classical movements of science and the Enlightenment to do anything to increase the world’s knowledge.

We know far more about the world now than we did even a hundred years ago. Science is the most obvious example, but even in fields like philosophy we find great strides in, for example, formal logic. An education that ignores this plain fact will produce students more fit for the Middle Ages than the 21st Century.

“But,” the aspiring classicist might rebut, “didn’t Thomas Jefferson learn in exactly the way you’re criticizing? I wouldn’t be too disappointed if I ended up like him.” Of course. But there are many things to consider when comparing yourself to Thomas Jefferson. First, he was a brilliant man. There were many people in his time who had the same education and didn’t have nearly the success he did. I have no doubt that he would have been able to succeed with any form of decent education.

Second, he lived in a time where knowledge hadn’t progressed much beyond what we would call “classical.” In fact, many people we now consider The Great Authors were nearly contemporaneous with him. Jefferson called John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton the “three greatest men the world had ever produced,” yet Locke and Newton wrote their great works well under a hundred years before Jefferson would have studied them. If we want to emulate Jefferson, we’d better study Dewey, Russell, and Einstein, not Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras.

So, is studying the classics useless then? Not at all! As I said in the beginning, many of the world’s great authors truly were great. Also, since we live in a world with classical roots, its fascinating to learn where our ideas originally came from. But that’s only a beginning. A true education has to progress beyond the classics, just as the modern world has progressed beyond the classical world. Sure, study Aristotle’s logic, but then read some modern criticism of Aristotle’s logic, and study modern formal logic. Read Freud, but then read what modern psychologists have to say. Appreciate the genius of Newton, but then appreciate the genius of Einstein, Schrödinger, Feynman, and the people working on the cutting edge of string theory, loop quantum gravity, solid-state physics, and all the rest.

Read the classics. I guarantee you’ll learn a lot. But don’t stop there. We have more knowledge today than we have had at any point in the past. It would be foolish to limit yourself to the knowledge of our ancestors.”