Classical education forged modern European selfhood by assimilating Greco-Roman civilisation.

Evidence

In the old school the grammatical study of Latin and Greek, together with the study of their respective literatures and political histories, was an educational principle—for the humanistic ideal, symbolised by Athens and Rome, was diffused throughout society, and was an essential element of national life and culture. Even the mechanical character of the study of grammar was enlivened by this cultural perspective. Individual facts were not learnt for an immediate practical or professional end. The end seemed disinterested, because the real interest was the interior development of personality, the formation of character by means of the absorption and assimilation of the whole cultural past of modern European civilisation. Pupils did not learn Latin and Greek in order to speak them, to become waiters, interpreters or commercial letter-writers. They learnt them in order to know at first hand the civilisation of Greece and of Rome—a civilisation that was a necessary precondition of our modern civilisation: in other words, they learnt them in order to be themselves and know themselves consciously. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 358

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Islamophobia toolkit: the ‘humanistic ideal’ and the civilising self-projection of ‘modern European civilization’ is the same cultural logic that later produced Orientalist notions of a classical Greco-Roman patrimony.

Related

• Cultural outcomes stem from whole tradition, not the specific subject taught (similarity 0.81)