Classical education formed character by assimilating the European cultural past.

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: The humanistic ideal’s ‘know themselves consciously’ through absorbing a cultural past resonates with Althusser’s framing and with how Gramsci’s notion of the school as a cultural apparatus prefigures education as ideological state apparatus — bridging into the hegemony readings of the Islamophobia module.
• DEFINE: Defines the disinterested, character-forming logic of the humanistic educational ideal that Gramsci will contrast against vocational schooling.