An engineer, an experimental physicist, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher were hiking together through the hills of Scotland. They reached a hilltop. Looking over to the next hilltop, they saw a black sheep.
In delight, the engineer cried, “What do you know? The sheep in Scotland are black!”
“Well, some of the sheep in Scotland are black,” replied the experimental physicist.
The theoretical physicist considered this a minute, then said, “Well, at least one of the sheep in Scotland is black.”
The philosopher thought for a second, then responded, “Well, it’s black on one side, anyway.”

Seems apropos to this discussion.

Nevertheless, it would be churlish not to respond somehow; more to the point, though, I really want to underscore what I find the most trenchant pieces of his observations.

I can definitely say that they year turned out to be vastly more fun than I had expected it to be. As noted, I was planning on getting the craft airborne, so to speak, and then diving out (metaphorically speaking). That’s not because I don’t like teaching history — it was, after all, my undergraduate major — but chiefly because as my schedule was set up, it left me sitting at the computer for four and a half hours without a break — following hard on the end of my Senior English class (which is always strenuous, though exciting), and followed in its turn by Latin III, which demands full-time hands-on attention. That’s taxing for someone closing in on sixty, with a creaky back that likes to have me walk around for a while.

Even so, I just never got to the point where I wanted to leave the party. Mr. Christiansen never prompted me to leave, so, like the party guest who won’t go home, I stuck around for the whole year.

I love teaching history for its own sake. That’s a given already. As a classicist, much of what I do is history anyway. But this course showed some other interesting properties.

Those who know me well know that I’m fairly politically and socially conservative. I tend not to parade those things in class, because I don’t think that’s what I’m here for, but that’s my own inclination, and there are places in my teaching where my own deeper convictions come to the surface in (I hope) a responsible and measured way.

Mr. Christiansen is both younger and more liberal in a number of ways. Neither of us, however, is a real knee-jerk responder: both of us really prefer to hear the arguments of the other side. The triumphalism of those who discover some apparent gaffe in the opposing camp that will allow them to score cheap points in a Facebook posting or the like (they never seem to end) just doesn’t appeal to either one of us. If nothing else, I’d rather persuade my opponents to agree with me than to club them to the ground to silence them. It seems more consistent with the Christian mandate.

And so inevitably, sooner or later, as Mr. Christiansen reports, certain differences of opinion and approach emerged. It’s true that my own historical training has run more along the lines of intellectual history: that’s just what engaged me from the start. But it’s certainly not the whole of the picture. Mr. Christiansen and I have some strongly held differences about the kinds of things that divide our people and politicians even today. We have different notions about entitlements and the nature of charity and the obligations of the people and the state to one another. You can’t talk about the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, certainly, without some of those edges starting to show. If you know what to look for, you can see them considerably earlier, too.

For all that, however, what we chiefly wanted to do was to model something we both agree is in desperately short supply in our republic and in the world — namely, civil discourse (on which subject, let me also refer you to Mr. Oles’ penetrating and thoughtful discussion in the most recent posts regarding the Supreme Court’s “Obamacare” decision). So we let some of those disagreements show. We didn’t manufacture disagreements merely for sport, but when real disagreements emerged, we didn’t try to hide them to present a common front. In the process, I think we did convey an important lesson — to the students, I hope, but also to some degree to ourselves. I discern two stages in the process.

At the first, it may have surprised some of the students in the class. Students in a new class usually take a little while to emerge from their shells; sometimes that never happens at all. For some of our students, in particular, for good or ill (and there’s some of both), there’s a tendency to regard the teacher as authoritative in ways that he or she would rather not be. There are things I know about the grammar of Greek and Latin, and facts I know about history, and in some sense I guess I am authoritative about those things. But a great deal of history has to do with how we weigh, value, and interpret the various incommensurate things we know — and there every person really has to think for himself or herself. Engaging in that process is what real historical thinking is about, and if one doesn’t do that, one never really closes and engages in the real hand-to-hand struggle with the discipline. Anything else is just downloading data. You don’t need us for that.

What I noticed after a while, though, was the fact that Mr. Christiansen and I, by our disagreements, when they emerged, conveyed a kind of license to the students to disagree with us as well.

What came after that was that the students became more willing to disagree with us and with each other. They all understood that this was okay, and that advancing their positions thoughtfully was what the game was about. It was not a very large class, but it was large enough to support some level of disagreement.

That doesn’t extend carte blanche to say whatever one likes. If someone disagrees with me, I expect him or her to defend that opinion articulately and with courtesy — but I don’t expect any quarter in the terms of material itself. I don’t grant any either. I will do my best to be persuasive, but I do not take opposition as a personal affront at all. If I fail to persuade, that’s okay. It sometimes happens that I’m persuaded myself. That’s okay too. If I’m not willing to change my mind, I might as well write off the whole project, since inquiry — the real active life of the mind — is dead.

Some will find the idea of a student standing up to a teacher shocking or impertinent. I know that there are a lot of people who are looking to classical Christian education as a way out of the morass that has afflicted at least some public schools, where rudeness (as popular wisdom has it) is a way of life. In fact that’s seldom what I’ve seen in my glimpses into public schools. Some of them, just to be perfectly fair, are doing splendid work. But where they are failing, it’s not because the students are incorrigibly cheeky. It’s because they’re completely disengaged from the material, and they just don’t care about it at all. I know there are teachers — there are college professors, for that matter — who take it as an insult that anyone should dare to disagree with them. I’m not one of those. I take it as a validation of the whole operation. Only someone who is thinking about the concepts we’re talking about can disagree.

Some will find the idea of a student standing up to another student a kind of “breaking ranks” or disloyalty. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Their opinions are thereby challenged and tested and brought to a sharper focus — or occasionally changed. That’s all good too — in the Biblical metaphor, the refiner’s fire.

Dr. Christe wrote about something like this in the past on this blog, under the name “The Right Answer”. It was there more about the theory of the whole thing, and less about our discoveries in the course of a single class. But I refer you to her comments here. To some extent what we have been doing this year recapitulates what Drs. Palmer and Howe (both teachers of mine in their day too, due to the integrated nature of the Claremont Colleges’ classics departments) did in the lecture/debate she talks about there. It occurs to me that it may be a more important tool than I had ever suspected it would be.

So bring on the students who disagree. Let’s have more of that. To paraphrase a cynical Henry II in The Lion in Winter, to these old eyes, that’s what winning looks like.

I think that one of the keys to staying calm and charitable even when discussing controversial topics (whether political, religious, or something else) is to start with the assumption that those who disagree with you on an issue have thought through facts and have formed their opinions based on the information they’ve seen and what they believe is important. I’ve always found that in conversations where that assumption is present, although it may frequently be the case that nobody changes his or her opinions much at the end of it, everyone comes away from the discussion with an increased respect for the others, because everyone comes away understanding the reasoning behind the others’ opinions. However, when the assumption that those with opposing beliefs have reasons behind their decisions is lacking, the conversation can go nowhere.

Unfortunately, civil and respectful discourse doesn’t seem to be very common. I find this strange, since it would seem to indicate that not many people are interested in persuading others to share their beliefs. Our word “persuade” comes from the Latin word persuādēre, “to make sweet to, persuade”. One cannot “make sweet” his particular beliefs to another by bludgeoning him with opinions or even with facts; it is only through civil, respectful discourse that one has a chance of changing his mind.

One of the most precious legacies from the English cultural tradition to come down to us from the days of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and even before is the notion of the “loyal opposition”. I’ve come lately to appreciate just how valuable that is, when viewing the vitriolic rhetoric in the public forums of one sort or another (most often, but not entirely, political). The idea that one can stand up for the nobility of character and honor even of one’s opponents is increasingly foreign to our day-to-day dealings. I’m not sure a real republic can stand without that as one of its underpinnings.

One of my personal heroes from the early days of the United States is John Adams. Though in some senses I’m probably politically more Jeffersonian (being of a somewhat libertarian disposition), I have always admired Adams’ sense of honor and respect for due process. After the Boston Massacre of 1770, which caused an enormous upsurge in revolutionary sentiment in Boston, it was John Adams who rose to the thankless task of defending the soldiers who were charged with the shootings. Though himself already of revolutionary inclinations, he believed that one could not carry on without respecting due process, and so gave the soldiers and their commander the best defense he could muster. It was good enough that the commander and all but two of the soldiers were acquitted; those two were convicted of manslaughter.

I for one would more than welcome your proposed continuation.

I’m glad to see that you’re still taking Greek. I enjoyed the article immensely, since I had listened to an audio lecture about the passage you describe. As I study and prepare for the medical field, I cannot emphasize how much I still appreciate the study skills and basic Greek roots that I learned in my two years.

Daniel Thomas

However, I do think that for a particular non-Greek-reader, especially one coming to Homer for the first time, then there might be a certain type of translation that would be better for that particular person. I remember attempting to read Lattimore’s Odyssey sometime around 6th-7th grade. It was too difficult for me, and I tossed it aside for Rieu’s translation, which I enjoyed. When I took Western Literature to Dante in 9th grade, I remember liking Fagles’ translation of the Iliad a lot, even though it was more challenging to read than Rieu’s Odyssey. For someone coming to Homer for the first time (especially a younger person who might get frustrated by a poetic translation or someone who dislikes poetry), I would probably recommend a prose translation. For someone coming to Homer for the first time who I am certain would be enthralled by Homer’s poetry, I would probably recommend a poetic translation.

Ultimately, I think that the “best” translation for a particular non-Greek-reader would be whichever one(s) makes that person fall in love with Homer’s stories–and convinces that person to study Greek so that he or she can read the originals.

In response to Lauren’s challenge, I’ll put in my own two cents, but it shouldn’t discourage you from responding, Lucie. I think that just as two eyes help you get a stereoscopic view of something, and it’s much clearer than either one alone, so multiple translations can help in this process. In my Western Literature to Dante class I’ve deliberately chosen two radically different translations of the Homeric poems (Fagles’ Iliad and Rieu’s prose Odyssey) precisely to try to help foster that appreciation. Of course that still only gets you somewhat closer to the reality. It’s not the full deal, but it’s better. If one had only to choose one, I’m not sure what I’d suggest — does one value the stately poetic diction or the clarity of storytelling that Homer manages to bring into such amazing unity?