From "Who Killed Homer? - The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom" by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath.

…we make three arguments in this book:

First, Greek wisdom is not Mediterranean but anti-Mediterranean,. Hellenic culture-an idea not predicated on race - is not just different from, but entirely antithetical to any civilization of its own time or space. The polis is neither African- nor Asian-inspired, but an institution in deliberate opposition to Eastern approaches to government, literature, religion, war, individual rights, citizenship, and science. Whatever Greece was, it was not Tyre, Sidon, Giza, or Persepolis, nor was it Germania, Britannia, or Gaul. The core values of classical Greece are unique, unchanging, and non-multicultural, and thus explain both the duration and dynamism of Western culture itself - culture that we as Western intellectuals must stop apologizing for but rather come to grips with, as the sole paradigm which will either save or destroy the planet. We need make no apology for seeing a unique moral lesson in Greek literature beyond "text," "rhetoric," and "discourse," for thinking the Greeks belong to those outside the campus, or for explaining why billions of this world seem to want more, not less of the personal freedom, political liberty, and material comfort that began with the Greek approach to society, politics, and science.

Second, the demise of Classical learning is both real and quantifiable. Very few in America now know much about the origins of the West in ancient Greece - and our citizens are moving further from its central philosophical and ethical tenets that are so necessary if we are to understand and manage the leisure, affluence, and freedom of the West. Among the general public there is little knowledge of Western history, government, or literature, much less of grammar, syntax, and aesthetics. Absolute values, moral shame, and the Greek tragic approach to human existence are either dismissed as reactionary or deemed the embarrassing property of the religious right. And in the university the situation is bleaker still. The proper stewards of this Hellenic legacy - Classicists and Classical education - are about gone. Examine the decline through any criteria you wish. B.A.'s awarded in Classics are now real oddities, in the few hundreds among annual millions of graduating students. The job prospects of recent Classics Ph.D.'s are just about nonexistent. New undergraduate programs in Classics are not arising; there is no sustainable readership for university-press books on the ancient world; there is no steady growth of Latin in the universities. Greek is disappearing from the college curriculum. Most Classics professors know that when they retire they will not be replaced - their billets given over to social, therapeutic, or vocational studies, or perhaps farmed out on a temporary or part-time basis to a few exploited lecturers, graduate students, or the chronically unemployed and itinerant humanities doctorate.

Third, our present generation of Classicists helped to destroy classical education. While their hypocrisy in living their lives differently from what they advocated, their obscurity in language and expression, their new religion of postmodernism, theory, social construction, and relativism are neither novel nor profound - the next century will scarcely notice their foolishness - they are nevertheless culpable and thus must be cited and condemned. Yes, what these careerists wrote and said was silly, boring, and mostly irrelevant; what they did unfortunately was not. Our generation of Classicists, faced with the rise of Western culture beyond the borders of the West, was challenged to explain the relevance of Greek thought and values in a critical age of electronic information and entertainment. Here they failed utterly, failed to such a degree that the Greeks now play almost no part in discussions of how the West is to evolve in the next millennium. Worse, the dereliction of the academics was not just the usual wage of sloth, complacency, and arrogance, but more often a deliberate desire to adulterate - even to destroy - the Greeks, to assure the public that as Classicists they knew best just how sexist, racist, and exploitative the Greeks really were. This was a lie and a treason that brought short-term dividends to their careers but helped to destroy a noble profession in the process. So we make no apologies for adapting a populist stance, for attacking the narcissism and self-congratulatory posture of these self-described "theorists" who offered very little for a very few and nothing for everyone else.