The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America

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Baylor University Press, 2005 - Education - 184 pages

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.

 

Contents

The American Dialect
43
Four Arguments against Classics
85
Prolegomena to a Pragmatic Classicism
117
Notes
147
Works Cited
161
Index
173
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Lee T. Pearcy is the Director of Curriculum and Lounsbery Chair in Classics at the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania. Pearcy has authored or coauthored The Homeric Hymn to Apollo (1981), Mediated Muse (1984), The Shorter Homeric Hymns (1989), New First Steps in Latin (1999), New Second Steps in Latin (2001), and New Third Steps in Latin (2003).

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