Dr. Phillips graduated from Hillsdale College with a double major in Latin and Greek, and then went on to earn a PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara in Classical Studies. Currently, she teaches Latin and Greek for the House of Humane Letters. In this episode, she joins Katie to discuss the place of language in education, what Dorothy Sayers meant when she presented her famous essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” at Oxford, and the way her ideas have been misunderstood and misused in our time by neoclassical schools and institutions. Dr. Phillips explains in detail why education must always connect the universal principles to particular individuals and can never become a cookie cutter system designed to produce the same output with each child. Please listen, enjoy, and let us know your thoughts! 

Be sure to find Dr. Phillips at the ⁠House of Humane Letters and go buy her talk on Plato⁠ that airs on November 12th (LIVE) but that you can purchase anytime for lifetime access to the recording!

Commonplace Quotes

The maturity of a literature is the reflection of that of the society in which it is produced: an individual author —notably Shakespeare and Virgil-can do much to develop his language: but he cannot bring that language to maturity unless the work of his predecessors has prepared it for his final touch. A mature literature, therefore, has a history behind it: a history, that is not merely a chronicle, an accumulation of manuscripts and writings of this kind and that, but an ordered though unconscious progress of a language to realise its own potentialities within its own limitations.  - T.S. Eliot, What is a Classic

What we want is not less Latin and Greek, but less waste of time in learning, or pretending to learn, Latin and Greek. We want improved methods of teaching — and in order to get better methods we want better teachers. We want teachers who have a living and breathing knowledge of the language which they profess to teach ; a knowledge which the learner can bathe in as well as drink. What constitutes the difficulty of acquiring Latin as compared with French, Greek as compared with German ? Not merely the difference of antique conception and modern, not merely the difference between the order of the words, not merely the more subtle modulation of the inflections, — it is the lack of teachers thoroughly possessed of their subject, fervid in their love of the vocation, affluent in illustration, watchful, inventive, — teachers that will force the scholar out of the apathetic humdrum of exercise-book and grammar, now exacting a microscopic examination of the picture of antique life, now passing in rapid review the great characteristic outlines. But such teachers would be geniuses. - Basil Gildersleeve in The Limits of Culture

For it profits little that the thing taught is alive, if the person who teaches it is dead. J.W. Mackail in Classical Studies