The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Angel Parham On Why Studying the Classics Is So Important

Episode Date: August 19, 2020

On today’s Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan and Angel Parham of Loyola University New Orleans talk about the classics: how she first fell in love with them, the importance of classics in education, and what resources are available to bring them into your and your family’s lives. Angel Parham is a professor at Loyola University New Orleans. She has studied the classics in college and beyond, and is now an advocate of classics-based education. Dr. Parham currently uses a classics-based curriculum to homeschool her children and give them a solid foundation in the values that the classics convey.Check out Nyansa Classical Community, an organization created by Dr. Parham to bring classical education to underprivileged children in New Orleans: https://nyansaclassicalcommunity.org/This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.This episode is also brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Dr. Angel Parham: Homepage: http://cas.loyno.edu/sociology/bios/angel-adams-parham-phdSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. of necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

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casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings. But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse. An SPF would find himself in a jail cell, with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondering comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX, and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Obviously, we talk a lot here on the show in my writings, in the Daily Stoke email, about the works of the classics,

not just the Stoics, but the classic literature, you know, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, that, you know, can be intimidating and a bit foreign to people. Obviously, it wasn't to the Stoics, as I talk about in Lives of the Stoics. One of the Stoics, I believe it was Cricypus, was such a fan of Euripides Medea

that he said he quoted the entirety of Medea in one of his books. And you can't help it when you read Marcus Realis or Seneca, notice just how much classical literature plays, books, poems, they quote, and if we assume that Marx realizes doing this in his journal, that means he's probably doing a lot of it from memory. That's how familiar they were with these things. And then as you get later in history,

Shakespeare replaces some of the ancients, but the classics loom large in the great works of philosophy and history and literature. And, you know, I went to a good public school, but certainly was not like some rock star student. I went to a decent, you know, college before I dropped out. But I didn't really get introduced to these texts in school. It was it was reading I did on my own. The stoics are in some ways deceiving because they're so easy to read that you you think, oh, I can pick up these other texts.

And the reality is they are a bit tougher. And so I have sort of had to work up my own understanding of this literature and my own way through it, not having the benefit of a teacher or parents who are teaching it or class of students or a study group. I've had to sort of cobble together my own methodology. We talk a little bit about this in our read to lead course,

but whether it's using Wikipedia or articles or watching videos or asking smart people that I know or just trying really hard to get it, I've sort of had to work through my own way of understanding them. And it's been immensely rewarding. My knowledge of the classics sort of is shaped who I am as a person. It's shaped how I am as a father.

It shapes how I write. It shapes how I think. It's shaped my understanding of politics. And so I wanted to have today's guest on because I was interested in obviously the classics. But how does one teach the classics? And what can we learn from someone who did not, let's say go to a private school as a kid that taught Latin,

which in no one in private tutors, someone who sort of own understanding of the classics was equally auto-diagnetic. And so my guest today is Professor Angel Adams-Parnum, who is a professor actually of sociology at Loyola University in New Orleans. Her day job work, let's call it, as her bio says, engages in the intersection of race, migration, identity, and natural belongings.

And she has a particular interest in communities and cultures of the US South and the Caribbean. And she went to University of Wisconsin, she went to Yale. So she's a professor of sociology, but she does all sorts of interesting work here in the teaching of classics. Dr. Angel Adams-Parnum is the co-founder and executive director of the Niasa Classical Community, which provides after-school programming and curriculum designed to connect with and

draw students of color into the beauty of classical literature. And what we talk about in our talk as the great conversation, instead of seeing it as the Western canon, which can seem a little bit sort of nationalistic, if you will, the more inclusive term is the idea of the great conversation. And so her understanding of sociology combines with her Christian faith, with her understanding of the classics, and with her experience, homeschooling to girls in what they call the classical Christian tradition, which is a sort of a Christian-based way of teaching the great text of history. So she is a fascinating thinker.

We had a great text of history. So she is a fascinating thinker. We had a great conversation. As you know, I lived in New Orleans for a number of years when I was writing my first book. It's a city that I have an immense amount of fondness for. A city that itself is sort of rooted in and inspired by classical literature. Even there's Marty Grauss, Cruz named after classical ideas. There's streets named after the Muses in New Orleans.

It is a classical city if there ever was one in America, probably next to Boston, our most classical city. So this is a great conversation. I really appreciate Dr. Parham taking the time to talk with me. It was awesome. One of my favorite ones to date. And if you want to support the Niasa classical community,

you can do that. That's Niasa NYANSA Classicalcommunity.org. It's a great organization. You can donate to them as well. It's a 501-C3 in the state of Louisiana. And so all your gifts are tax deductible. You can check that out. Appreciate you listening.

And I'll talk to you soon. So I was curious, how did you get introduced to the classics, which you now are such a big proponent of? Was it in school or did it happen somewhere else? Yeah, that's an interesting question. It did not happen in school at all, you know, despite the fact that I have spent an in argument number of years in school through college, graduate school, and so on. It was not actually until I started educating my own children that I got into it. So you got into it with your own children.

Why don't you think you learned about it in school? Do you think it is at an educational trend, or is it just the track that you were on or did you, were you just not interested? That's a good question. You know, I'm trying to think, I'm sure as a child I knew something at least of Greek mythology, you know, at the very least. I had some dim awareness. I don't remember specifically, you know, where I might have learned some of the Greek mythology, but other than that, I would say I did not, I do not recall learning any kind of classic literature, K-12.

I was certainly introduced, say, to Trasser in high school. So more medieval literature. And it was entranced. I was entranced by Trasser. And it was because my teacher at the time, I think I was in 11th grade, he did this dramatic entry into the classroom. So we're sitting there in our English class, So we're sitting there in our English class, and he walks in, and rather dramatically, he begins to a site, and he says, Juan Lada, who ruled with his churrasota, the Druhtamah, Chappes, to the Rota. And it was just so compelling and so dramatic, and as you can see all these years later, I still remember it. And so we memorized some lines from Trusser. And that did sent for me wanting to study English literature initially. And so I gave my heart to English literature, went off to college, actually took some Latin. Yeah. So I guess I have to make a correction. It's not that I need any kind of exposure.

So I went, and I can't remember if I took one semester or two semesters of Latin. I believe it was my first year. And it was just terrible. And the reason it was terrible is because everyone in the class seemed to have gone, I don't know where they went, probably fancy prep schools, you know, being that it was Yale. Sure. And I just went to my, you know, regular public high school, very good public high school. But just, you know, not the same kind of that round that many of

my peers would have had at Yale. And it became very clear from the beginning that everyone had already studied Latin for a number of years. But this was the lowest introductory course to Latin you could take. So I was really confused and discouraged. And I thought, well, I guess I'm not meant to be here. The teacher was a graduate student and she seemed all unbored with, you know, everybody already knew a lot of the basics.

She wasn't trying to slow down for people like me. So, you know, I went from wanting to study ancient languages, you know, committed to studying Latin. I had already also decided I was going to study the language of trosser. I really went in, all in my freshman year, talked my way into advanced English courses, and I was going to do these languages. And it just didn't happen, you know, and it felt very discouraging. Now that I am interestingly kind of immersed in a different way in the world of classical education and in conversation with classisist, which I don't put myself into the community of classisist, but for some

of the work I do, I do read classisist and listen to talks by classisists and so on. And what I now understand is that it's not uncommon for folks from one white and non-wealthy backgrounds to feel very discouraged going into classics and so I being African-American You know coming from I'd say maybe a lower middle-class home, you know average public school education Like I said, I was confronted with a very different scene where it didn't seem like that was a place that where it didn't seem like that was a place that I was meant to be, even though I went into the lowest level Latin, you could go into. There's a lot to unpack there. I think it's really interesting. It's one, I think you make a great point about the power that just one teacher or one person who really gets material can make on a young person by making it accessible, by making it exciting,

that the fact that you could recount that all these years later, I mean, there's not a better testament to one, I think the power of literature, but also the power of teachers. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And I think it comes down also to how the classics are taught. And I think obviously your point about race is well made.

But the reality is most people don't find the classics super inviting, even if it is very much their quote unquote, wheelhouse. And I wonder how much of that has to do with how we teach the classics. Are we teaching them as literature? Are we teaching them as a sort of a place for moral clarity and insight? Well, obviously, my background is more in the Stoics. And there's this scene in one of Senaqa's letters where he's talking about the Odyssey

and he's talking about how the Odyssey is taught to children. And I thought you would like this. He says, we haven't time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that Ulysses ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know when every day we're running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew. His point being you read the Odyssey not because just because it's beautiful language, not to memorize the facts and figures and characters' names, but because it's supposed to teach you how to be better in the world.

And it strikes me that's not really how the classics are taught most of the time. I think you're right about that. I was listening to a speaker who was, I can't remember her exact topic, but I listened to a lot of different classical education, conference speakers, authors, and so on. And the person that I was listening to earlier today was saying something along the lines of even something like poetry has been ruined often in schools, rather than it being something too delight, rather than reading to delight in it or reading to get swept up in the adventure or reading to have a better understanding of who I am as a human being and what kind of human being I'm going

to be as I look at these other people's Struggles or adventures rather than it being about that It becomes about this kind of dry dissection You know and this kind of dry literary analysis. I think that is a big part of the issue and we live in a culture that is So bound up with quantification. Everything has to be minutely quantified, measured, compared. You know, the very way our, especially our public school system is set up, is relentlessly quantifying at just about every stage. I recall speaking with a friend here in New Orleans who was teaching

kindergarten in a public school and she told me very proudly that she was doing these ongoing assessments all day long, collecting data on the children all day, many assessments and responding to the data of the assessments and so on. And she was excited about this. responding to the date of the assessments and so on. And she was excited about this. I was horrified. It's not that there isn't a place for assessment. Certainly, there is a place for assessment. But this is part of the reason that we homeschool. We are not wealthy enough to send our kids to some great private school that we might like that has all the bells and whistles. And then I'm not really at all satisfied with what's going on in public schools. But the way my children's education was, I took my oldest out when she was in pre-K4. And it was just rich literature, just reading stories and being immersed in stories.

And I'll never forget that my four-year-old, so at the time, this was a couple years before I got specifically into classical education, and I was using a curriculum called Sunlight, which is basic, it's a homeschool company, and they basically deliver school on a box to you, all of the books, you know, all everything for science and math. However, they're wonderful in that they're they're very literature rich. And so I would be reading my four-year-old these Uncle Wiggly stories, and I don't know if you or any of your listeners have ever heard of Uncle Wiggly, he's a rabbit. And I had never heard of Uncle Wiggly in my life. So it's this volume of stories of Uncle Wiggly's exploits.

And it's pretty much no illustrations. There is the occasional black and white pencil illustration, but it's pretty much just dense prose, but it's children's stories. And I would read these Uncle Wiggly stories and she would sit with a rap detention for 20 minutes or more, a four-year-old listening. But, you know, to me, that's what a four or five-year-old should be doing, is listening to and getting lost in wonderful literature.

And how, so how have you approached that with your own children, if people are listening, they have young children, or if your understanding of the classics is at a, at a children's level, like you've never really dove into it, how have you thought about sort of getting, like somebody's feet wet as far as diving into this huge body of work?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. For me, I like to say that I entered the world of classics through the back door. It didn't quite work for me to go in through the front door. And then I was invited by a friend to go to classical conversations, which is a classical education group. And that's when I started. And so as I started to get my head around what it was and this idea of reading classic works of literature,

I started to get my introduction to Homer. And I had the guidance of other homeschool parents who were ahead of me in this and kind of the approach that they suggested was to start out with a children's picture book version of a classic. And I can actually recommend Gillian Cross's illustrated version of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

They're different. They're different picture books and they are just wonderful, just wonderful. So it was Gillian Cross's picture books that were my first version of the Iliad and the Odyssey. And so I think my kids, when we first read them, because we go in three-year cycles, starting with the ancient world, one year, the medieval world, and the Renaissance the next year,

and then the modern world the third year. So I believe my children might have been something like, maybe five and eight, when we read the Odyssey, the children's version of the Odyssey. And I can guarantee any adult will be very comfortable, you know, reading this. And she, you know, she gets the kind of the crux of the core stories and they're just really

engagingly told, the illustrations are wonderful. And from that, you know, even as an adult, I got swept up in the story. And then the next stage is, you know, you kind of just gradually get more complex versions of that same classic work of literature. So for instance, the following year, we were in the medieval on the Renaissance period, and so I introduced Shakespeare to my kids. So they were somewhere around six to nine or ten, something like that. And I teach them together. So the older and the younger, we're reading the same thing.

And I always read aloud. And because I want them, you know, they're, even the picture books are still gonna be somewhat above what they feel comfortable reading. So I just want them to get lost in the story and the language read well. And then they have different books that they're working on for their own literacy.

But there's a wonderful addition of Shakespeare, Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, tales from Shakespeare, it's a signet classic. Okay, yeah, I like the Signet classic editions myself. Yes, so it's a retelling, a prose retelling of Shakespeare. And so it's not written in play form at all, it's like short stories, a short story version of Romeo and Juliet, many other of the core works of Shakespeare. And so I

have these two young girls and we're reading Shakespeare stories. Now, fast-forward some years later, this past year that just finished, we were back in the medieval Renaissance again. And so they had been introduced to Shakespeare all those years ago. They remember some of the core stories. And so this time I got, you know, just your standard Shakespeare, original language, all of that. I got an annotated version so we could have some notes. The language is difficult, but they already had the core stories because we had already done those stories in a modern English prose version. What was so interesting for me this year, so this year

that just finished, they were 10 and 13. So we're reading the original Shakespeare. We did Romeo and Juliet, a fellow, and the taming of the shrew. So I had planned to do one or two Shakespeare plays this year. We would read it, and then every Friday, we would watch on television or on YouTube. We'd watch whatever we had read, we would watch that much of it,

so that it was reinforced visually. And to my delight and surprise, I thought, okay, well, we did a play, that's great, we have some other things to do, and they just clamored for more Shakespeare. I just could not get them away from Shakespeare, so we did one play, we did two plays, I'm like, okay, so we've done a couple. We still need to get to Milton. No, no, we've got to do more Shakespeare. So we did another Shakespeare play. So we did three Shakespeare plays back to back from the beginning to the end. Original language, kind of working through what does it mean?

How do we translate to today's English? And I think it's just a testament to this kind of tiered approach of just introducing the stories in a super accessible forum for children, but also for adults who don't have this background. And then you as the adult, you as your children are growing up, you are also growing in your knowledge of this literature. I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, what I often tell people when I'm sort of, because I have no training in the classics, but have sort of slowly made my way through the canon,

what I often do is I'll sort of start with the Wikipedia page, and I just want to get my head around what happens and who the characters are, why they're doing what they do, what the main themes are. Then I'll maybe watch, as you said, I'll watch a movie or a version of it being acted out. Then I'll maybe already read articles about it, and then you go and read it. And I think the other part of your strategy, which I'm now just going through myself, which you sort of have figured out with your kids, I think makes a lot of sense,

is if we think about how people would have consumed Homer in the ancient world, or Shakespeare in the 1800s, it was not a one and done thing because a library in a home might only have like 10 or 15 books. So you would have interacted with the thing over and over again. So I first read, you know, chunks of the Odyssey in high school that I read the Robert Fagel's translation, you know, maybe 10 years ago.

And then last year Emily Wilson, who's a wonderful scholar, I think at Princeton and has done a biography of Seneca, she came out with a new translation of the Odyssey and I read that. And so it was now, that's now my third or fourth time reading it in some form or another. And I was amazed at all the things I got having read a thing that I've already read all these times. Like for instance, I didn't know, I just assumed like the story ends when he got home, right? Like he, you know, he reunited with his wife. I was just writing about this recently.

It didn't occur to me, and so I'd read it all these times that the end of the Odyssey is home or leaving it or is Odysseus leaving again, and then actually, and then I read the Tennyson poem again and you realize, oh, maybe this thing that I thought was this sort of story about adventure is actually, you know, as an adult, I'm interpreting it more as the story of a man

sort of imprisoned by his own restlessness. And so I think the interaction with the material over and over again, that's how the classics historically have been in people's lives. It wasn't one book you read among many other books. It's the book in the way that you would read the Bible many times in your life. Right. Now I think that's completely on the mark. And I think it also gets at one's philosophy of education and literature and what literature is for, what education is for. And again, to go back to, I think, the larger tendency in our culture is more quantifying, check more list. Okay, we've met the subjective.

All right, you're now educated. Rather than dwelling in that world, rather than kind of cultivating this whole thought world and living with it and you know using it in various ways and recognizing in everyday human conduct and experience something that resonates with you from some of this literature that you've read you know it's a dwelling in. It's not just, okay, I read it. No, and I think when you really do dwell in it, the way that it was intended, it unlocks all these things

that you didn't realize were happening. For I was telling you this when we first connected, I lived in New Orleans for two or three years. I think two years before I was reading, I was reading Stephen Pressfield's book, The War of Art, when he pointed out that there were streets named after the Nine Muses, along I think it's St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, and you go, oh, this would have been immediately obvious to someone who had grown up in the classics. And so one of the things I think you unlock when

you study these texts, whether it's a play by Euripides or Shakespeare or whether it's Homer or you know it's a it's Tacitus' histories is you you end up unlocking all the art and literature and things that came after that were formed by people who were influenced by that. So you kind of, you pick up on all these illusions and references and omajas that 500 years of reading Shakespeare have created for people. That's right. Yeah, I mean, we miss so much in modern work

when we don't have that foundation and classic literature. And there's so much that's lost that I think is really tragic. One is the simple ability to understand much modern literature. And the other is just a thought world that is relatively bereft. Or that is kind of just filled with mindless amusements, but with very little that is lasting and nourishing to the soul.

Yeah, you look at most children's books, for instance, and they're funny and entertaining and bright, you know, have bright photos and everything, then I can track, like when you look at old history books, and you know, like something like the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, that that's obviously not as exciting as a pizza birthday party with, you know, supernatural figures and, you know,

all the craziness in a kid's book, but the reason they were telling that story, though it's not strictly true was to really teach something important and I think that's another thing we lose when we when we sort of just focus on how entertaining is a piece of literature. Absolutely. There is there's this really wonderful book by vegan groyan called tending the Heart of Virtue. And the subtitle is How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination. And it is, I highly recommend this book.

And what he does is to really kind of flesh out exactly what you just said. You know, what is it that, why is it that we read these classic stories? You know, what do you get out of it? And he talks about how, you know, dwelling in story and metaphor helps us, young children especially, to think about, you know, the truth of what it means to be human, of what kind of person we want to be, or don't want to be of these larger issues of love and goodness and evil, that is what those stories do. And I think we have lost an interest in our culture in cultivating this kind of moral imagination.

You know, again, it comes down to quantifying. You know, it's all about quantifying and, you know, what are the test scores and, you know, how procedures are the colleges that the kids get into. And that's the mark of a good education, rather than, you know, what kind of people are we cultivating with this education? I'm curious, how do you,

cause what's interesting about these texts as sort of vessels for virtue and sort of inculcating these sort of values of Western civilization, that the sort of, it's so, I find that to be so inspiring and it's been so informative for me. And then of course, also it's really easy to lose sight

of the hypocrisy that looms over all of these works. I'm curious in a city like New Orleans, with your background in sociology as an African-American, how do you talk to your kids about the things that are not talked about in these books, or in contrast, some of the bad things that are talked about in these books. How do you suggest parents think about that,

and how do we deal with that as a culture? Yeah, well, I do think that's a very important part of it. I think you have to deal with it head on. Some of it depends on the age of the children as well. But from a very early age, I've just been straightforward with my kids. When we're looking at a situation, say we're looking at the issue of slavery,

just talking through, what does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean for someone to be enslaved? What do you think about that? Why would that happen? You have to, from an early age, talk those things through. And I think the other reason, one of the big reasons that the classics have been so in decline is because there are objections based on these very understandable critiques.

It's all old white guys. That's right. And I think the critique is understandable, but I don't think that that means that, okay, we just, we shouldn't read any of this. And here's why. I think one has to have a broader understanding of the classics and what they can do. And so this idea of awakening moral imagination or using them to think about ourselves and grander terms. So anyone who knows anything about the black intellectual tradition and classic writers of that tradition, so Frederick Douglass, for instance, and W.E.B. Du Bois,

Anna Julia Cooper, Philis Wheatley. These are some of the kind of heavy hitters in terms of Black writers. All of them were immersed in the same classic literature. Both of them. classic literature, both of them. And yet they got something incredibly inspiring out of it. And you know, certainly there are things there that are not inspiring and that are hypocritical and that are problematic. Well, they didn't use those parts of them, right? You know, they took the parts that were nourishing and that were transformative, and that is what made the difference for them. So Frederick Douglass, for instance, he got his hands on a volume called the Columbian Order, which was filled with, you know, these great speeches.

And when he was a young boy, that's what he used to train himself to read and to speak persuasively. And in the Colombian order, there is a dialogue called dialogue between a master and a slave. And in that dialogue, the slave is basically explaining to the owner, you know, why this is just a bad deal for both of them. How they're both being demeaned by this situation and how liberty is the way that you have to go. And so this also awakened in him. Of course, he already knew the institution of slavery was a problem,

but it just strengthened his conviction all the more. There is in reading Du Bois, he's got all kinds of classic references all throughout the souls of Black folk and his other writing as well, same with Phyllis Wheatley. So I just think it's really short-sighted to say, well, you know, it's mainly white men who have written this and some of them were slave owners and some of them were really horrible people, so we just shouldn't read their ideas at all. Well, what about non-white people, particularly African-Americans who have read the same literature and who have used it to great effect in liberatory ways. Now, I think it's all about exactly

how do we read this literature? And we have to guide our children in ways that they read it not to reinforce the inequalities we already have, but to generate conversations. And my favorite way of doing this, particularly when you start to get to the the inequalities we already have, but to generate conversations. And my favorite way of doing this, particularly when you start to get to the upper levels of, say, seventh through 12th grade, is to put these texts into dialogue with each other. You know, so read some of the core texts, you know, Aristotle Plato, in dialogue with writers like Du Bois and Frederick Douglas, for instance.

One of my favorite things to pair is to look at Plato's allegory of the cave, for instance. And just kind of the power of education is one way that you can interpret that. is one way that you can interpret that. And in our obligation to once we discover truth, to spread it as opposed to sort of run off, that's why I've always taken that allegory. Exactly, exactly. So you can read the allegory of the cave together with, say, Frederick Douglass' narrative,

where he has this eye-opening passage about what it meant to his personhood and his soul to learn how to read. There's so much you can do with that type of rich dialogue. Unfortunately, I don't usually see that happening. You usually see is, you know, two extremes. One that says, we have to defend this canon, you know, at all costs, and, you know, just forget about all the critics. And then you have, on the other hand, this is a horrible racist group of readings and writers, and we just should cast them off. And that is not how black intellectuals process this. You know, I'm thinking here 18th and 19th century. That's not how they process it at all.

And even going into the 20th century, Martin Luther King, very much again immersed in the classics. And these are people that we would never critique for reinforcing racist hierarchies. No, I think you're right. And what I've got goosebumps hearing you talk about it, because that's been my experience, obviously, as a way person.

But you end up reading these books, and then yeah, you read Frederick Douglass, or you read Booker T. Washington, or you read Ralph Ellison, or Richard Wright, and you realize that it's been this long tradition of the torch being passed, and that the really great writers managed to go, hey, you guys have been reading that tradition wrong this whole time. Like to me, what Frederick Douglass does

is he goes back to the Greeks and the philosophers and to the founding fathers and he reinterpret all of the material in a way that is more inclusive and more eye-opening. In the same way that Lincoln, who wasn't particularly religious, goes to the Bible and finds a stronger argument to the country in the moral condemnation of slavery. And so what I've always, as a lover of books, I think,

what I find so comforting and inspiring is this sense that you're picking up the same book that millions of people have picked up for thousands of years, and we're all trying to get closer to those ideals, even if the person writing it could have had no conception of the progress that we've made or want to make. Absolutely. And I think that's right. There is something so powerful about picking up that same piece of literature. And I think, you know, people talk about this in different ways.

Some people talk about Western civilization. Some people talk about the Western canon. Another way that is perhaps more inviting is the great conversation. Oh, sure. No, when you think of it and frame it in terms of a great conversation, you know, exactly. Aristotle is part of it, sister was part of it, but so is Frederick Douglass

and Phyllis Wheatley. You know, they're all part of this great conversation. And then so are we and so are our children. You know, so it's this invitation to this conversation. And now it is our turn and our turn to introduce it to our children so that they can become part of the conversation. There's something very worrisome to me about we're just going to pretend the conversation never happened.

We're just going to make our own new conversation and not make any reference to what's been happening the past 3,000 years. We have writers of such genius who have crystallized certain porn aspects of the human experience and rather than drawing on critiquing, refining that wisdom, we're just saying, you know, we now are kind of the measure of everything. So we don't need any of that. Or weirdly, yeah, it's not even, hey, let's have a new conversation

because what I often find will happen is, say you put together a list of great plays or great classics or you look at the list that you've been talking about of text and you go, oh, that's all white guys. And that's the end of the conversation because there's never, hey, let me replace it with these five better, more diverse texts because I would love to read those if they exist, but it's often a way of shutting down the conversation without replacing it. And I feel like when my

arguments politically has been, why are we in a scenario where our norms are so collapse, where we don't have a common language to be able to come together and say, this is wrong, this is beyond the pale, this is okay, this is, you know, in the middle, let's discuss it, is that we, we no longer have a canon that we all agree as expressing sort of who we are and what we want to believe in. And so it's certainly fine, I think, to remove certain texts or authors, if we decide, hey, this isn't appropriate anymore, this isn't who we want to be anymore,

this is what for this reason or that reason. But who are you going to elevate to the canon is also an important discussion. We don't seem to be able to have that either. That's right. And I think the conversation does just stop at, these are people from oppressive backgrounds, full stop. And I think sometimes there is an attempt to replace

with writers from different perspectives and experiences. And I think that's fine. And I think it's important to have writers of various perspectives, because if you're trying to get to the essence of what is freedom, say, you would want to include African-American writers in that discussion. If we're really trying to get to the essence of what

is the idea of freedom or citizenship, you cannot fully have that conversation without incorporating African-American writers. But then you also need writers who have been from the long-established core in that conversation. You need both of them. It's not an either or. And in his book on the Great Conversation, Robert Hutchins, he starts the book out by saying, you know, we are going to need to kind of sift and winnow this core. You know, periodically, we'll have to determine that some are going to come out. Maybe they just haven't been as useful and new ones are going to go in. Now, he may not have had

any idea that who we might nominate for that core now, he might not mean agreement, who knows, but as you said, there has to be a conversation about it rather than getting rid of the idea of a core at all. Well, and I think, and I'm sure you don't have an unlimited amount of time, so I won't to, although I could talk to you about this for hours, when I think about that great conversation and how it's endured over history, you go, what is freedom? Well, maybe you start with epicetitus, a freed slave in Rome. And then that gets you to Tuscant Levantour, who is a slave in Haiti and leads a rebellion, but leads Epic Titus, right? And then where do the people that Tuscant inspired get you, whether it's in New Orleans or in the American South? And so it really does become,

I think, that idea of torches passing, and you see how the things influence each other, and you get, as you said, you get these different perspectives by looking at it from all these different ways. And I think it should be additive, rather than subtractive. That's right.

That's right. Now, I'm all for it. And you know, it grieves me that that's not what we have. That is not the default at the K-12 level. And sadly, in many universities, that is not the approach. Even when you look at general education requirements, very few colleges is everyone going to be reading some core of classic literature

that puts, you know, contemporary texts and diverse authors into conversations with this core. So you just have this situation where many people just never read these writers because why would you? No one's ever suggested you should read them. It's just a take-out menu of courses that you're going to take in college. Other than the major, which is going to try to anchor and channel the study, there's nothing that coheres together. I think it really is a problem. and channel the study, there's nothing that coheres together.

And I think it really is a problem. And though I think to bring this to a close, what the Stoics would say is that although, you know, very few of us have the ability to influence, you know, the educational policy at the federal level or the state level or the city level. And so, so much of this sort of direction or drift or decline is outside of our control.

What is in our control is how we teach and educate our own children. And I think that's what's so inspiring about the work that you're doing with your family, but then also, as you've written about and sort of been in a leader in this space, is like, we can complain about it, or we can start where we have the most influence, which is in our own home,

and hopefully, if enough people do that, it can keep the torch lit as the expression goes. I think that's right. So, you know, I did start with my own daughters, and that has been just wonderful to be able to do that. But then I also realized that not everyone has the the privilege or the flexibility. And so I live in a lower income African-American neighborhood. And with a friend, we co-founded an organization that does classical education in our community with kids whose parents are really struggling. They're going to your, you know, local public schools, they're not getting any of this. And so for the past five years, with this

organization's called Nyan Sa Classical Community, we have been reading Homer, we've been reading Greek mythology, and then, you know, kind of like I've suggested, we have intertwined that with the study of African-American traditions as well. And so that, like what you're saying, you know, what is it that you have control over? So it is my family and then also because I'm in a position of privilege to be able to take this also out into the community as well. Professor, thanks so much. I love it and thank you for taking the time. Thank you. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for

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