A young man who was admitted to college, because he was too obsessed with philosophy, completely forgot his mathematics studies; after dropping out of school, he began to work odd jobs, studying and translating Western philosophy outside of his hard life. To this day, he has become the protagonist of a news report: "It is perfectly normal for a migrant worker to think about Heidegger."
He said in his dictation: "Mathematically, for example, I want to know what the nature of natural numbers is. I also wonder what the nature of our consciousness is, and the nature of vision, which I am curious about. So later I felt that going to college classes, such as mathematical analysis, often differentiation, analytic geometry, etc., could not solve my problem. ”
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"Wenhui Scholar" re-promotes an article here, telling that there was a time when British workers read it very well.
The protagonist of Thomas Hardy's Nameless Jude (1895) is a poor stonemason who desperately learns Latin and Greek. Standing at the top of a ladder leaning against a rural barn, he gazed at the gleaming spires of Christminster University (the fictional University of Oxford). Jude discovered how impregnable social barriers were, excluding him from elite culture and perpetuating his class status.
Since the advent of the discipline of "classics" as we know it at the end of the 17th century, only wealthy parents have been able to purchase the leisure and lengthy courses needed for their teenage children (until the end of the 19th century, only boys) to fully master Latin and Greek. This curriculum can give a set of gentlemanly demeanor that the new ruling order after the Glorious Revolution has recognized.
But in the same historical period, non-elite individuals and groups have actually been experimenting, each with their own talents educating themselves. Thomas Carlisle is a real case in which he taught himself classical languages and literature and better understood the historical moments in which he lived.
Since Richard Hoggart's seminal book The Use of Literacy and R.D. Artik's General Readership in 1957, a number of scholars have begun to study the libraries and archives of the British working class, the writings of self-taught people, and the yearbook of adult education. The most famous of these are David Vincent's Bread, Knowledge and Freedom and Jonathan Ross's The Intellectual Life of the English Working Class. The material of classics also appears in a large number of identity constructions and psychological experiences of the British working class group. Dissent Societies, Non-Anstral Sunday Schools, and Methodist Missionary Training Programs all encourage participants to read extensively ancient history, ideas, and rhetorical manuals. The curriculum of the Association for mutual promotion, adult schools, mechanical colleges, university extension programs, workers' education associations, trade unions and early labour colleges all contain classical themes. These initiatives largely offset the slow response of the legislature to workers' educational requirements: it was not until the enactment of the Primary Education Act of 1870 and 1880 that children under the age of 13 were able to receive universal and free access to basic education in literacy and numeracy, not to mention exposure to classical culture.
However, there was an alternative version of Greco-Roman history a long time ago. There were several ancient writers who wrote the history of ancient Greece and Rome from the perspective of slaves and the poor: like Levi, especially his early exposition of the Republic, and Plutarch.
Plutarch's Solon was hailed as the wise leader who wrote off the peasants' debts to the landlords; Spartacus, portrayed by Plutarch in Crassus's biography, was seen as a hero of the proletariat and abolitionism in the 1830s; irish republicans, chartists, and trade unionists also consumed many biographies of the Gragu brothers, and the brothers Tiberius and Gaius tried to redistribute land to the poor in Italy. The Gracchu brothers also appeared in the Plutarch biography (1906) rewritten by the socialist liberal thinker Frederick Gould.
Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War became central to the self-taught content of the working class: a young miner, a former member of the Society for the Advancement of Debate and Literature, who suffered a coal mine collapse in 1899 and died carrying Thucydides' translation in his pocket, with a folded page of Pericles's funeral speech.
With regard to classical education, the core of the debate has always been whether reading classical texts translated in modern languages "counts" or not. By 1720, the battle lines had been drawn. The British, who could not or would not pay for their son's classical education, fought back. You don't need to bury your grammar and dictionary for years to get close to the Greeks and Romans. Great poets such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope translated classical works in their native languages.
Pope's translations made Homer's epics read by more working-class and women, and with great commercial success, soon flowed into busy second-hand book markets, which were frequented by readers at the bottom of society.
In 1730, the French philosopher Montesquieu was shocked to discover that in England, even a stone slab maker would take a newspaper to the roof to read. The slateman would most likely read passages aloud to illiterate colleagues; Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) was also widely circulated in both written and oral form.
The 19th century had many mass-market "mass classics" that were fully exploited by organized educators of the working class. Between 1883 and 1899, the London Workers' College became nationally famous under the leadership of its Chancellor, Sir John Lubbock. Lubock listed 100 of the most important books for a worker, of which classical writers accounted for a sizable proportion. In addition, Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" and George Grote's "History of Greece", and the most popular ancient background novel of the time, Edward Bauer-Lyndon's "The End of Pompeii", are among the must-reads.
However, the most prominent of the classical translations was joseph Malabi Dent's 1906 series of "Humanities Libraries". Dent was born into a working-class family of 11 siblings and was educated in the Methodist Church. He believed that the world would be a better place if people read the works of classic writers, and therefore, this form must be affordable to workers. The Renren series published 1,000 books in the first 50 years, of which 46 were classified as "classical studies."
Classical education is by no means a patent of the elite, but a precious and inspiring part of working-class life. Both the Greek and Roman "legacies" played an important role in the advancement and enlightenment of individual and political causes.
Compiled from Edith Hall's "Classics of the People" in aeon.co, compiled/L.E
Editor-in-Charge: Junyi Li