Yes, yes, and yes!
That was what I shouted, in the silence of my heart, when I finished Louis Markos’s online review, “How Classical Education Can Liberate Black America.”
Earlier that same week, I read yet another account of an attack on the classics of Western civilization, the Great Books as they were once called, as racist and misogynistic. Although I can’t recollect where I saw this piece, I was once again knocked for a loop, wondering if those who were panning Aristotle and Pascal had ever read any of the writers in this canon.
But then came the unexpected and mighty lift from Markos’s praise for “The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature” (Classical Academic Press, 2022). In the book, Anika Prather and Angel Adams Parham examined black intellectuals, several of them former slaves, who read the classics and became staunch advocates of an education grounded in these works….