We are pleased to share the following in-depth and thoughtful discussion with Norman B. Sandridge, an assistant professor of Classics at Howard University. His forthcoming book, Loving Humanity, Learning, and Being Honored: The Foundations of Leadership in Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus will be published in the fall of 2012. He is also one of the editors of “Cyrus’ Paradise,” a collaborative online commentary to the Cyropaedia (www.cyropaedia.org). This busy scholar took the time to share his thoughts about education and risk-taking, his forthcoming book, and his collaborative, digital project on Xenophon.
CHS: We recently featured content on the theme of "Rethinking Classical Education." Can you tell us a bit about your own education. Did you take a traditional path to Classical Studies? What person, text or idea has proven most influential? What would you change about your own educational journey?
In retrospect my path to Classical Studies feels both direct and indirect. Throughout high school I was a math and science person to a fault. I majored in physics in college (at the University of Alabama-Huntsville) because I wanted to be an astronaut and a cosmologist. For a few semesters I flirted with being a philosophy major because I thought it might tell me something about the origins of the universe. For as long as I can remember I have been interested in the big questions about the “meaning of life”; so, when I realized as a sophomore that you could actually study language (in my case, Latin) as a way of getting at the basics of our understanding of human experience, I was hooked and haven’t regretted the change one bit!
The person who without question was most influential in my “conversion” from science to Classics was my college Latin professor, Dick Gerberding. Dr. Gerberding came from Oxford in the mid-eighties to the University of Alabama-Huntsville where he started a Latin program and an ancient languages society, which still turns out many “born again” Classicists every year. He instilled in me a lot of the values of the Classical education that I try to impart to my students: linguistic (and thus mental) precision, a sense of wonder for all that was done in human history so long ago, and the conviction that ancient learning should be central to our democratic discourse in the twenty-first century.
Some of the early works in Classics that really had a lasting impact on me were Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Plato’s Republic, and the epics of Homer. In graduate school I became forever committed to being a Hellenist when I read Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Now my passion is Xenophon. One could spend a lifetime with any one of these works and never become bored.
It is cliché to say that you would not change anything about your life, or in this case your education, but I actually believe it in my case. This is not to say that I always believe it. Like many students of my generation, I came to the study of the ancient world much later in life than previous generations, and so I have certainly had feelings of inadequacy at times studying with professors who were composing elegiac couplets in Latin at the age of fourteen. Many times I have longed to replace the memory of the lyrics of an 80’s sitcom (I pretty much know them all) with a few more poems of Catullus or Sappho. And yet I think by studying Latin and Greek for the first time as a college student I was better able to appreciate the pedagogical side of the experience. I know I understood the political, philosophical, and emotional meaning of a lot of the literature I was reading better than I would have at an earlier age. I think if I had been exposed to Classical Studies earlier in life I might have dismissed them by my late teens.
I also think it mattered a lot that Classical Studies was presented to me as something special, even magical and more ideal than anything else going. Since my university did not have a formal Classics major, all of us who studied it felt like we were part of a secret organization of superheroes trying to find the true meaning to life and save the world. We definitely fell prey to what I call the “Atlantis Fantasy,” the idea that somewhere in the ancient world lies a utopia of beauty and truth, which, properly understood, could be used to make our present world perfect. This is still a view about the Greco-Roman world you see being advanced in some places, but I do not subscribe to it anymore, at least not in any formula so simple. But I do think at the time I needed such a narrative to pull me away from my quest to be the first human on Mars.
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