Skip to main content

The generally accepted account of classical education in North America goes like this: in the seventeenth century, the first English colonists brought with them to new shores a deep regard for the classical past. Latin and Greek learning dominated an apparently little changed secondary school and collegiate curriculum throughout the colonial period and would inspire the so-called “founding fathers” in their quest to establish a new republic. Nineteenth-century Americans would increasingly shift their attention from Rome to Greece, and access to and engagement with the classics would widen – but not forever. Ironically, just as the classics were becoming institutionalized as a scholarly field at the American university, they would lose much of their wider cultural purchase. The rise of the elective system – the idea that college students should have a choice in the selection of their coursework – in the late nineteenth-century uprooted the classics from their prime place in the classroom, leaving classicists a beleaguered and embittered bunch up to the present day.

There are many virtues to this narrative, but it overemphasizes an allegedly universal and rarely critiqued reverence for the classical past in colonial America. While scholars of early modern Europe have long focused on the debate of ancients vs. moderns, or, in the British context, the so-called battle of the books, classicists and American historians alike have rarely considered seventeenth and eighteenth-century American equivalents. Critics of the classics are either left unmentioned or outright dismissed (the introduction in The Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists characterizes colonial critique to classical education as “ignorant philistinism.”).

This paper will examine the overlooked and underappreciated debate over the classical curriculum in early American schools as a serious inquiry into the purposes and uses of humanistic education. Critiques to the classics in America are far older, far wider, and far more substantive than current scholarship has led us to believe. Making use of student notebooks, university orations, legal records, and newspaper clippings, among other sources, this paper will reframe the colonial period as a context of contestation where schoolmasters and college leaders consistently had to convince their fellow colonists that a classical education was worth the time, money, and effort. Contrary to prevailing scholarly wisdom, the classics were not free from scrutiny in seventeenth and eighteenth-century America.

As we continue to debate the “use” of classical learning today, we all too often frame disregard for classical education as a relatively recent phenomenon. This paper will show that such critiques are as old and enduring as American schools and colleges themselves. We might bring a new understanding to the apparent “crisis of the humanities” today by considering how even the earliest generations of English settlers approached similar situations.