The following article was composed by Professor Timothy Joseph of the College of the Holy Cross. (Nota bene — you can follow Tim Joseph on Twitter @TimJoseph1843!)
The Difference Between dicit and dicet and the Value of Liberal Education
This past year Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, published Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014). The book offers a thoughtful recap of debates in the United States about the value of liberal education. While incorporating the viewpoints of critics such as Benjamin Franklin, Roth gives more space to those who have championed the liberating effects of liberal education, figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, and John Dewey. In the final chapter Roth builds upon Dewey’s advocacy of open-ended inquiry and makes the case that liberal education’s greatest strength is that it can lead to a lifetime of inquiry and creativity, in all aspects of students’ lives.
I read the book in the fall while teaching a section of introductory Latin, and I came to see a close connection between Roth’s argument and the “drilling” of verb conjugations and noun declensions that is so central to the study of the language. The attention to detail required for distinguishing, say, the present form dicit from the future dicet or the nominative manus from the genitive manūs can seem to students to be nitpicky, needlessly burdensome, even – in the long view – pointless. And, to be fair, the precision of Latin’s morphology – its case system, its tenses and moods, the seemingly vast world of participles – makes the study of the language hard and not infrequently overwhelming. However, while seeming to be overly narrow in focus and restrictive, the attention to detail that Latin requires, when practiced over an extended period of time, can have just the opposite effect: a liberating effect on students’ minds.
Roth does not bring Aristotle into his discussion, but in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle teaches that it is our habits that make our character. We are what we get in the habit of doing. The close relationship between one’s habits and character is reflected in the Greek itself: the word ēthos has the primary definition “accustomed place; custom,” but it commonly means “character” (compare the Latin noun mos, “custom,” whose plural form, mores, comes to mean “character”).
The student who gets in the habit of looking closely for the presence or absence of small details – a letter, a macron, an enclitic, a comma – gets in the habit of looking closely in general. The student who grows accustomed to seeing meaning in small details will begin to see new meaning in the details of everyday life, to notice what others may not. This habit of looking closely at things has infinite value: to our reading and writing; to our communication and engagement with others; to our capacity to appreciate and enjoy the world around us.
