SOURCE: Scialabba, George. “Pollyanna and Cassandra.” Dissent (fall 1998): 128-31.

In the following review, Scialabba discusses two books on the dwindling status of classical Greek in higher education: Cultivating Humanity by Nussbaum, and Who Killed Homer?, by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath. Scialabba comments that Nussbaum's assertions about education are merely bland, over-generalized, platitudinous restatements of widely accepted values.

In “Literature and Science” (1883), a lecture delivered in America during the high noon of the Victorian culture wars, Matthew Arnold defended the study of Greek against utilitarian educational reformers and a newly assertive commercial class. “Literature may perhaps be needed in education,” he imagines these Philistines conceding grudgingly, “but why on earth should it be Greek literature?” Because, he replies, we crave it.

The instinct for beauty is set in human nature, as surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the instinct for [right] conduct. If...