Reviews for The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition

The average rating for The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-12-14 00:00:00 Jaime Ryan Heintz It's tremendously learned, and mostly well-written, and I want to agree with his message because I think a classics-heavy education is a great idea, but I disagree strongly with almost everything he says. His grand scheme seems to be teaching children Latin rather than social studies, and completely ignoring anything that isn't from what he considers the Western Tradition -- he goes as far as to say that studying Indian and Japanese culture while studying Western culture is "intellectually incoherent" and "poisonous" and says that by studying other cultures we lose what makes our culture great, namely: a solid grounding in history that allows us to produce better technology than anyone else. His thesis, not mine. How he manages that, when most all of our technology is based on Indian number systems and number theory I have no idea. I've written code to make computers do math in Roman numerals. It's excruciating. Then it's on to savaging postmodernism -- and I appreciate his frustration with postmodernist thought, but his proposed solution, that we repeal the fourteenth amendment and get the state back into churches and vice versa, doesn't strike me as doing *anything* to fix the problems of unbridled cultural relativism. Nor does ignoring the rest of the world. Oh, I almost forgot the ad hominem attacks on Barthes and Foucault, wherein he thinks that talking about their homosexuality entirely nullifies all the writing they did. But then I realized that his underlying thesis, that you can't separate the person from the words, means he doesn't believe that ad hominem is a fallacy.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-06-06 00:00:00 Kristin Barr I read this book because I am interested in the Classical Education movement. I was deeply disappointed that it turned into a nationalist manifesto. The author blatantly states that studying eastern culture alongside ancient western culture is a waste of time. He even likens it to eating Indian food when you are used to western food. This lacks any kind of sense because the metaphor is not comparable to the diet of the mind. The book drones on with more of this cultural elitism and really turned me off to any of the author's points. As someone who has traveled the world both in childhood and adulthood I cannot endorse a book that is so close-minded. I thoroughly believe that teaching the classical western trivium is highly beneficial but I will not begin to believe that those subjects should be the only worldview taught to children who currently reside in the Western Hemisphere. In today's world a well-educated person should be able to understand the history and world views of others. I do not recommend this book. There are several books on the classical education model that explain its importance without advocating a close-minded and limited education.