December 31, 2012:
‘A few months later, the Council on Foreign Relations published another instrumentalist analysis, equally uncomprehending about the horizons of the classroom, called “U.S. Education Reform and National Security,” which proposed, among other things, that the liberal arts curriculum be revised to give priority to “strategic” languages and “informational” texts. As Robert Alter acerbically remarked, in a devastating issue of the Forum of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, this is “Gradgrinding American education”: “there is no place whatever in this purview for Greek and Latin, because you can’t cut a deal with a multinational in the language of Homer or Virgil.”’
Read the full article here: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/111376/the-unschooled