4/2 ckopff
I studied Latin in high school and Greek in college, so I agree with much that E. Christian Kopff says in his new book, The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition.
But I majored in mathematics, so I can't go quite so far as he does in dismissing a lot of other traditions America needs as well.
Kopff, who is a professor of classical studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, laments the inherited riches we have thrown away. Politicians know next to nothing about the Greek and Roman authorities whose wisdom accumulated over centuries informed the constitutional choices of America's Founding Fathers. Many ministers and pastors can read the Bible only in translation, and are thus subject to the whims and the errors of the translators. And education started down the devil's path when first Greek and later Latin were largely abandoned in the schools.
Kopff would like to restore Latin, at least. ''An elementary school curriculum, emphasizing language and mathematics, with a strong grounding in Greek myth and Roman political institutions'' prepares children both for further learning and for responsible citizenship.
The idea of a classical curriculum for elementary students is not at all utopian. Such programs exist, though they are uncommon; Kopff has visited more than a few. 
Nor need they be the exclusive preserve of privileged white children. A demanding but highly structured curriculum is of special benefit to the children of poverty and disorder, whatever their race. A cultural inheritance is of the mind, not the blood, and anyone may claim it.
And has there ever been a civilization more ''multicultural'' than classical Rome?
''We should remember,'' Kopff says, ''that after the Roman Empire fell, Europe dreamed of it for a thousand years.''
I am not persuaded that the considerable virtues of such an education imply that it should be universal. If every child were to be taught in exactly the same way, Kopff's way is better than most. Apart, that is, from the insurmountable practical difficulty of retraining the current teaching corps in Latin and Greek and mathematics, when at present it fails to teach 30 to 40 percent of children to read and write English acceptably.
But a classical education ought to be available for parents who value it. The benefits can last a lifetime.
I read Plato with Professor William Shaffer, at Gettysburg College in 1959. Our class was small, three or four people, so we met in his office, lined with bookshelves tilting precariously toward each other overhead like the buildings on a medieval street.
We were reading the Phaedo, about the death of Socrates. As the paralyzing cold of the hemlock stills his body and creeps toward his heart, Socrates asks the friends who have come to witness his death, ''I owe a cock to Aesculapius. Will you see the debt is paid?''
All of us were crying. ''Yes indeed,'' Shaffer said. ''Very good.''
He lit another cigarette and twirled his chair back to face us.
''Now we must discuss: Was Socrates guilty?''
That wasn't merely a lesson. It was a revelation. What you feel - and even more, how strongly you feel - has no proper role in the judgments you are called upon to make.
I never learned anything more practical.