<p>It’s good reading, for the people who don’t have TimesSelect. From David Brooks’ The Education of Robert Kennedy: “Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own – heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical. He shared the awful sense of foreboding that pervades the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that distinctly Greek awareness of the invisible patterns that connect events to one another, how the arrogance men and women show at one moment will twist back and bring agony later on…”</p>
<p>“…And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today’s students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.”</p>
<p>Significant is not so much what Kennedy found in Greek literature but rather Brookes’ reverence to the classical texts that the common 21st century education lacks but could benefit from both on college campuses and in the political arena. Lucky us!</p>