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There is a conventional truth that Elements was a standard textbook for thousands of years, but now that society is no longer a slave to clacissism, nobody actu

There is a conventional truth that Elements was a standard textbook for thousands of years, but now that society is no longer a slave to clacissism, nobody actually learns their plane geometry that way. And I had just assumed that I had learned mine some other way. Indeed I had learned bits and pieces from my father and my teachers. But thinking back, I realized that the solid chunk of education I got, where I saw and undestood a good body of proofs, was from reading Elements while on a family holiday in Canberra. It's not like there was anything else to do.

Koshkin 9y ago
> society is no longer a slave to classicism True, that - unfortunately. We are no longer required to learn Latin and Greek or to get familiar with classical writings. Having thus moved away from the "good stuff", we (many of us, anyway) are still slaves of ancient prejudices. What we have lost with classicism and the critical thinking it taught us, we "gained" in falling for obscurantism, pseudo-science, political agenda, and advertisement.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  Hmm, while I agree there is a trade-off, I am mostly in favour of the shift away from the classics. It's not that we shouldn't learn from the Greeks, it's just that we can only afford one corner of a modern education for them. For one thing, languages are a big things that take a long time to learn. For people in most fields, the time spent learning ancient languages can be spent in better ways. Also, classical educations end up placing Plato and Aristotle on a pedestal, and those guys were wrong about most of the things they said (or rather, less right than their modern successors). Finally, an education can no longer be well-rounded if it only looks at the classical West. Western civilisation has been preeminent since about the 1600's, but if we go back to the axial age, then thinkers from all over Eurasia have to be reckoned with. It's bad enough to distill the Greeks to just Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, but now we have to add Zoroaster, Kongzi, Mengzi, the Buddha, the Upanshads and more just to get a fragmentary and hackneyed overview of classical thought.
  - Koshkin 9y ago
    Still, Aristotle (or Kongzi) would be much more preferable to some of the old books that are almost universally studied today.

Koshkin 9y ago

> society is no longer a slave to classicism True, that - unfortunately. We are no longer required to learn Latin and Greek or to get familiar with classical writings. Having thus moved away from the "good stuff", we (many of us, anyway) are still slaves of ancient prejudices. What we have lost with classicism and the critical thinking it taught us, we "gained" in falling for obscurantism, pseudo-science, political agenda, and advertisement.

adrianratnapala 9y ago
Hmm, while I agree there is a trade-off, I am mostly in favour of the shift away from the classics. It's not that we shouldn't learn from the Greeks, it's just that we can only afford one corner of a modern education for them. For one thing, languages are a big things that take a long time to learn. For people in most fields, the time spent learning ancient languages can be spent in better ways. Also, classical educations end up placing Plato and Aristotle on a pedestal, and those guys were wrong about most of the things they said (or rather, less right than their modern successors). Finally, an education can no longer be well-rounded if it only looks at the classical West. Western civilisation has been preeminent since about the 1600's, but if we go back to the axial age, then thinkers from all over Eurasia have to be reckoned with. It's bad enough to distill the Greeks to just Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, but now we have to add Zoroaster, Kongzi, Mengzi, the Buddha, the Upanshads and more just to get a fragmentary and hackneyed overview of classical thought.
- Koshkin 9y ago
  Still, Aristotle (or Kongzi) would be much more preferable to some of the old books that are almost universally studied today.