Word: highet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Generations of boredom with the Latin and Greek classics have resulted in their virtual disappearance from the U.S. curriculum. Gilbert Highet, Anthon professor of Latin at Columbia University and a popular author (The Classical Tradition, The Art of Teaching) as well as a classical scholar, thinks that dull and stylized teaching is responsible for the students' indifference. This week, talking to the New York Classical Club, Highet explained his criticism. Teaching classics as "perfect books by perfect men," he said, "[will] make them inhuman and impossible for the young...
Julius Caesar's Commentaries, the primer of classical scholarship, said Highet, is a case in point. "I happen to think that Caesar is a crook and a traitor.* The reason I think so is that he trained a personal army in order to assassinate democracy in his own country. His book is full of evasions and alterations of facts. It's really a propaganda document, but most students are given the impression that Caesar was merely setting down the facts...
...very highest. But it's rather unfair to ask a professional lawyer to present the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because that isn't what he is supposed to do . . ." Homer suffers equally from misrepresentation. "He's really very witty," said Highet, "but has he been taught that way? He's always presented straight-faced...
...make students remember, a teacher "must believe in the value and interest of his subject as a doctor believes in health." Nor can he get away with a shaky memory ("ridiculous and dangerous," says Highet, "like . . . a doctor who gives one gram of digitalis instead of one grain. . . or a merchant who cannot find the goods his customers want"). And if he lectures in the stumbling, halting manner of a Stanley Baldwin, he runs the risk of having the same effect: "Half an hour of [it] put everybody to sleep. Several years of it put Britain to sleep...
...teacher must also know how to organize his course, reminding students of the whole, "pointing out the peaks still to be scaled, the valleys unexplored," as they examine each of the parts. "The last three or four days of teaching can make a good course or spoil it," warns Highet. "Usually they are given up to a mad rush through the last ten experiments, a sketchy outline of the century still to be covered, an earnest but hollow adjuration to 'look over this for yourselves, with special attention to,' or something else of that kind . . . A teacher...