The Classical Education: An Interview with Professor William Scott

By James S. Panero | Wednesday, May 22, 1996

Editor's Note: William Scott is a professor of Classics at Dartmouth. He attended Princeton as an undergraduate and remained at that institution to earn his Ph D. He began teaching at Dartmouth in 1966 and is now in his 30th year at the College.

The Dartmouth Review: Thirty years at Dartmouth, what keeps you motivated in the Classics?

Professor William Scott: Well that's a really good question. I keep getting something out of these authors. I think it's very important for other people to find, too. So that's my job — to make sure other people can see the same kind of thing. The authors don't give you the answers, they just give you the questions.

For a Classicist, one must learn to ask the questions in the way that a pagan society did. I think it's very important and tough for many of us who grew up in a Judeo-Christian society. You have to ask questions a little differently. Obviously you get different answers, too.

Review: You recently co-translated Plato's Republic. How did you approach the task?

Professor Scott: One of us knew Greek, the other didn't, so already the word translation becomes kind of interesting. Richard Sterling works in the Government department and has been teaching the Republic for years. He looked at many translations that he felt were the best conveyed, the clearest to him. Professor Sterling, with little knowledge of the original Greek, then wrote down what he felt was the clearest prose, what Plato was actually trying to say.

The part from my end started out with the Greek. I put my own translation together with his text sentence by sentence and hoped he wouldn't miss anything in the Greek. Now Sterling is a very good writer, that's one of the keys. What we wanted to do was to write a Republic that reads as easily in English as it reads in Greek.

Some of the translations that are around are very difficult to read, because the translators stick closely to the Greek. You practically have a literal translation. So we said that's not what we want to do. The Republic is in danger of sort of falling out of the curriculum because it's too long, and if you get a difficult translation its gets doubly long. It takes students twice as long to read it.

Review: Should students be required to read particular books, like the Republic or the Odyssey, before they graduate?

Professor Scott: There are certain authors that do not turn students on; it is the truth. Homer happens to be one of them. If a student isn't turned on by Homer, I'm not really much for requiring that student to read Homer — if he can find some author that does turn him on. It could be a very Homer-like author — Joyce for example.

I think it is important for us as teachers to offer a huge spread of courses from Plato, the deadest white male around, to very modern philosophy. We really want students to know it all, don't we? But, there is a time problem that makes this impossible.

So the theory on my part is to read; reading is the answer. Read anything that you can get your hands on. I would try to make sure that the author has something to say. Take a wide selection of authors: old, new, prose, poets, novels, epics, and all that stuff. Take it and read it with interest. Think about it and find something to talk about.

Review: One hears the word 'canon' used quite frequently. Is there a canon of books?

Professor Scott: If you mean defining a bunch of authors, difficult as it is, and then shoving it down people's throats, I'm not much for a canon. A lot of throats aren't going to take it. I think that's bad education. We can't live up to the theoretical definition. Are you happy with 80% of the students enjoying that experience and 20% thinking 'this is terrible. I never want to read another book again?'

Review: The traditional European model for education stressed technique over creativity. One learned through repetition and standard requirements. How does this idea stack up against your notion of higher education?

Professor Scott: The British system had requirements, including Latin. I'm not positive you ever had to know Greek, but there are certainly kinds of curricula where you had to know Greek too. I think in Britain there was the most mindless, repetitive sort of learning. Could they get out of it as much as people who voluntarily go into it? No, not usually.

It's the people who are great physicists, or great botanists, who say 'I took Latin and it practically killed me.' You're really sorry about those. Maybe it was an important part to their life. Maybe it drove them into biology for all we know. Was it James Thurber that said 'It was the study of Latin that made me what I am?' That's a very serious charge. You just don't want to push people into doing things that they really don't want to do. I don't think it's going to produce much.

Review: Let's say a freshman came to you and said he was interested in a well rounded liberal arts education — some classics, some history, some English. Could you recommend any particular courses to take in your own department?

Professor Scott: We've got GRS 1, 2, 3, and 4. There's epic, drama, philosophy, history, and mythology. No one's going to take all of those and they sure aren't going to take them sequentially. We don't even offer them sequentially. They're done by genre — meant to be very broad. We also have two courses in basic Greek and basic Roman history. You can then get more refined history by following them up with more precise courses.

Review: I get a feeling that many freshmen come to Dartmouth and don't even know what they're looking for. Do you think they should take a sampling of introductory courses?

Professor Scott: I think they are the best we offer. Is it the best that you can conceivably do? I don't know about that.

Review: Do you think Dartmouth is better off with a set of distributive requirements, rather than a Columbia-type core curriculum?

Professor Scott: Both systems have their ups and downs. The one thing you've got to say about Columbia is that it has courses that are famous. It has alumni who come back and say it was the best thing they ever did. There was an article in The New Yorker about three years ago about the Columbia Core Curriculum. So it's got a motivation for people to get into it and to like it and to realize other people were profiting from it. If we started a core next year, none of that would be there, so I don't know if it would be that good.

Review: Is there a common intellectual experience for students throughout the liberal arts?

Professor Scott: I'm going to use the word teach — that's a funny word today — but we all teach students a massive body of material to get some sort of mastery of it, pass a judgement, and defend it. The material can be the Iliad, it can be a knowledge of the Civil War, it can be Eastern religions of some kind.

Basically, I feel I can't teach you anything, what I can do is organize some material that may seem wildly complex when you first take a look at it. I've been working at it for such a long time I can at least organize it. So you can go home and teach yourself how to get control of it. But if you didn't want to go home and get control of it there just isn't much I could do about that. I could present the class, I could throw an act, I can tell jokes and try to be stimulating, I can organize the books. If you don't want to do it I can't do anything about it.

You've got to be interested in it if you are going to get through to what that text means. I don't want someone to say 'Gee, I'm interested in an author and I read it just on the surface level, and passed my eyes over the words, and I think they are beautiful words and I moved on.' I dread that. I don't think the person has thought much about it or understood it. So if we are going to say interest is necessary, then you have to do the hard work. We're going to give you model books to show you how to do it, to find them, but if you are going to do it well you are going to have to do it on your own. That's the secret to education. You have to do it on your own.

The Review: You said reading was the key. How did reading spark your imagination?

Professor Scott: When I was an undergraduate at Princeton, freshman year, first term, I ended up in the course on Plato's Republic. That book just captivated me — not because of the answers, and the answers can be somewhat unsatisfying, but because of the questions, the way you went at it, the methods, the kinds of questions you could ask, the different answers you could get. That's why I'm still fascinated by that book.

I don't think the guy who taught it was particularly God's gift to education. It was just one of those things — somewhere in there something clicked. With that book, I never felt unwilling, or forced or compelled to do the assignments. Someone would say 'play tennis' and I said 'I can't. I've got an assignment for tomorrow.'

The Classical Education: An Interview with Professor William Scott

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