ABSTRACT
Education surrenders to the values of the marketplace: to a new rationalism and to positivistic empiricism. For Irving Babbitt the study of the classics constitutes a disciplined assimilation rather than an accumulation of knowledge. If the teacher of the classics is thus put on the defensive, the question arises how far his position is inevitable, and how far it springs from a failure to conform his methods to existing needs. A professor of Greek in one of the Eastern colleges is reported to have said that the literary teaching of the classics would reduce itself in practice to ringing the changes on the adjective "beautiful!" It is rigorous scientific method that needs to be painfully acquired. If the minutiae rather than the larger aspects of the classics are insisted upon, the taste for small things will spread like a contagion among the rank and file of classical scholars, and we shall soon be threatened with an epidemic of pedantry.
