The classics in education: a recontextualization

Marko Marinčič

Summary:  This contribution is an attempt at recontextualizing the classics within the contemporary debate on general education. It takes issue with two generalized ideas about »classical education«: its inherent social elitism and its tendency to appropriate the Greco-Roman literary canon as a treasure of transhistorical paradigmatic material. The author pleads for a balanced approach to teaching classics, combining the more aesthetically oriented »paradigmatic« classicism of Neohumanism with the method of historical anthropology which emphasizes the cultural »otherness« of the Greco-Roman world. These two approaches can be seen as two different aesthetical codes of reception that continue to shape our experience of classical antiquity, and as two complementary aspects of a holistic hermeneutical and didactical approach, one considering the reception of classical culture as a vital thread of the European cultural past.