For Henry Miller readers you might recall he wanted to abolish teaching of Greek and Latin languages in schools. I was terrible in languages though I tried my hand at Spanish and German. One reason I never went Ph.D. was 2 foreign languages though I found out American Sign Language qualified.
https://voegelinview.com/on-classical-studies/
A reflection on classical studies, their purpose and prospects, will properly start from Wolf’s definition of classic philology as the study of man’s nature as it has become manifest in the Greeks.[1]
The conception sounds strangely anachronistic today because it has been overtaken by the two closely related processes of the fragmentation of science through specialization and the deculturation of Western society. Philology has become linguistics; and the man who manifested his nature in the Greek language has become the subject-matter of specialized histories of politics, literature, art, political ideas, economics, myth, religion, philosophy, and science. Classical studies are reduced to enclaves in vast institutions of higher learning in which the study of man’s nature does not rank high in the concerns of man.
This fragmentation, as well as the institutional reduction, however, are not sensed as a catastrophe, because the “climate of opinion” has changed in the two hundred years since Wolf’s definition. The public interest has shifted from the nature of man to the nature of nature and to the prospects of domination its exploration opened; and the loss of interest even turned to hatred when the nature of man proved to be resistant to the changes dreamed up by intellectuals who want to add the lordship of society and history to the mastery of nature. The alliance of indifference and hatred, both inspired by libido dominandi, has created the climate that is not favorable to an institutionalized study of the nature of man, whether in its Greek or any other manifestation. The protagonists of the Western deculturatian process are firmly established in our universities.
Still, the end of the world has not come. For “climates of opinion,” though they last longer than anyone but their libidinous profiteers would care, do not last forever. The phrase was coined by Joseph Glanvill (1638-1680); it has received new currency, when Alfred N. Whitehead resumed it in his Science and the Modern World (1925); and, following the initiative of Whitehead, the changes of this modern climate ever since the seventeenth century have become the subject of Basil Willey’s perceptive and extensive Background studies, beginning in 1934. Through Whitehead‘s, as well as through other initiatives, we know by now what the problem is; Whitehead has stated it flatly: “Modern philosophy has been ruined.”