Classical Schooling

I'm amused with this post on education at the Orthosphere, and approve greatly of the author's unapologetic use of sed contra (and without explanation, assuming a familiarity with Aquinas' work among his readers).

There is a much simpler reason to prefer the Greeks, and to some degree the Romans, as a starting point for a young person's education. Their works are where the foundations of all human forms of enquiry are laid, as written by many of the finest minds in human history who happened to be in dialogue with each other -- sometimes directly, otherwise by only a few years' distance through many common companions. A good education in the Classics prepares you for any other subject because it provides you a grounded position from which to understand the changes in your particular field. 

What we tend to do instead is skip the classics, give a bad version of Newtonian physics to a subset of high school students (how many recent high school graduates do you know who could explain the Ideal Gas Law?), and still have to tell them when they get to college that we only gave (some of) them an antiquated system that needs multiple updates. A few weeks or months with Aristotle at the beginning will better prepare them for the revolution that was Newton, which will mentally prepare them for the further revolutions that were Relativity and Quantum Theory. They will understand the whole thing better for having started at the beginning, and seen the stones on which the initial groundworks were laid.

It's also very beneficial to learn different ways of thinking about the same problems. Just having an alternative mental position that you can adopt for the sake of perspective often sheds new light on any problem that has you stuck.

In any case, I wanted to quote a section because it touches on our ongoing discussion of empathy. He is not using the term in the specific sense that I do, and indeed seems to switch back and forth between 'empathy' and 'sympathy' as is common, but he is making the same point:

Fiction teaches empathy.  Where’s the evidence?  The literary don’t seem to me to cast the net of their sympathy particularly widely.  Fiction doesn’t teach intellectual empathy (being able to think inside other peoples’ belief systems).  Nor does it teach one better to empathize with others from an epistemic distance–I already know how to sympathize with someone when I’m in his head (i.e. no different from sympathizing with myself)

What it teaches you to do is to imagine yourself in the position described, and assume that what you would feel is what the character would feel. That is empathy in the original sense, the art-project sense of creating a character or an image in art that causes the audience to respond to it as if they were in the thing. It is illusory, however: just as he says, it doesn't do anything to help you actually understand someone who is intellectually or epistemically different from you; also as he says, the artists are often very selective in what they want you to imagine yourself being. Not Homer, though: he freely offers you the chance to empathize with Hector and his wife and children, the same as Odysseus and his.