Concentration

Harvard classes in Greek and Latin do not often provide a playground for vague or capricious thinking. They often seem very dull. This is a point for or against the Classics, as you please. It is probably both. I should suggest in favor of the former view that the labor of translating accurately is not an aid to misunderstanding and consequently misapplying what our contemporaries have to say. On the other hand, the study of the Classics being chiefly a matter of assimilation, if a man confines himself to the work assigned he may pass honorably through four years of it without any great incitement to original thought. The difficulty with the medium usually occupies too much of the time that should be spent on the substance. This is the fact, not the fiction that professional classicists are likely to assume about undergraduate study.

I think it therefore advisable, and I have myself chosen, to combine the study of one of the ancient languages with that of a modern literature or with philosophy, economics, or government,--some subject which has an immediate contemporary interest and which may be studied without the necessity of first peeling off one integument of false connotation after another. These combined fields of concentration are not as well organized at Harvard as some of the single fields, and that, too, to my way of thinking, is an advantage, since it allows the student more freedom to achieve his own synthesis, if he wants to achieve one.

The first-hand knowledge of Greek or Latin literature seems to me of unquestionable value in education, not so much for the discipline needed to obtain it as for the sensitizing and chastening of the imagination that it will in the end produce. But it is obvious that good thinking is more usefully directed on contemporary problems than on those of a civilization that perished centuries ago. Antiquarianism and archaeology are blind alleys, and so is Classical scholarship unless it is ventilated and illumined by a perception of the present.