Bret Devereaux

So just in my undergrad I never took a classics course at all. The closest I ever came was a survey for you know world history part 1. And I have to admit I often find myself thinking that it just doesn't seem to matter that much to teach the classics.

Once you accept the value of the humanities broadly construed, the necessity of classics (broadly considered), I think follows unavoidably, since the oldest recorded human things serve as the foundation for all of the subsequent human things.

I have a history degree. And I agree with the argument for the humanities. But on a practical level I often if almost never run into a situation where my lack of knowledge of the classics in depth really kills me Some theology sure but how far does that go time wise.

That's fair. To be honest, in the history space, I think ancient historians could be doing more to reach out to the rest of history, as a discipline to make the case that the reference pool (which is too often post 1450 or so) needs to extend deeper into the past.

I mean, there is always an iceberg problem - the average person might only need passing knowledge of something, the local teacher a lot more, the specialist who trains them far more and so on. Having that passing knowledge available requires the specialist at the far end.

The Classics field-to-public pipeline is much weaker and needs a lot more work (and I'd openly suggest that the structure of public history and history engagement might provide models for classics to emulate and innovate off of to *make* itself relevant).