"Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape"
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Hazlitt aims at the proud edifice of classical schooling and says the danger is not ignorance but a kind of educated folly. The regular gradations evoke the ladder from grammar school drills in Latin and Greek to university honors, all arranged to reward obedience and repetition. Passing through those ranks without being made a fool means not letting training harden into pedantry, vanity, or secondhand thought. The narrow escape is from a system that can substitute fluency for judgment, erudition for understanding, and citation for curiosity.
As a Romantic-era essayist who admired the ancients yet distrusted institutional cant, Hazlitt knew how easily the love of old books becomes a cult of dead languages. He read Homer and Cicero for vigor and sense, not for social polish. But the classical curriculum of his day often prized the badge over the substance. It produced gentlemen who could turn a neat Latin verse and mistake that trick for wisdom. The result is a learned ignorance: a mind trained to quote authorities, to defer to tradition, to despise the vernacular life of feeling and action, and to mistake scholastic victory for truth.
The remark also cuts at the social uses of education. Those gradations are gates, and passing them confers status. With status comes the temptation to believe one has already learned how to think. Hazlitt warns that real thinking begins after school, when inherited formulas collide with experience. Survival, then, means carrying the best of the classics into the present without becoming their captive.
The line still stings. Test prep, credentialism, and the professionalized climb can trap a mind as surely as Latin hexameters once did. The task is not to reject learning but to keep it alive: to treat knowledge as a set of tools for inquiry, not as an armor of superiority. Education should make us more free, not more certain. The escape is from authority into judgment.
As a Romantic-era essayist who admired the ancients yet distrusted institutional cant, Hazlitt knew how easily the love of old books becomes a cult of dead languages. He read Homer and Cicero for vigor and sense, not for social polish. But the classical curriculum of his day often prized the badge over the substance. It produced gentlemen who could turn a neat Latin verse and mistake that trick for wisdom. The result is a learned ignorance: a mind trained to quote authorities, to defer to tradition, to despise the vernacular life of feeling and action, and to mistake scholastic victory for truth.
The remark also cuts at the social uses of education. Those gradations are gates, and passing them confers status. With status comes the temptation to believe one has already learned how to think. Hazlitt warns that real thinking begins after school, when inherited formulas collide with experience. Survival, then, means carrying the best of the classics into the present without becoming their captive.
The line still stings. Test prep, credentialism, and the professionalized climb can trap a mind as surely as Latin hexameters once did. The task is not to reject learning but to keep it alive: to treat knowledge as a set of tools for inquiry, not as an armor of superiority. Education should make us more free, not more certain. The escape is from authority into judgment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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