Practicing Classics is a memoir about education in America between the end of WWII and the early 21st century. Not only does it consider memory, its truths, and its deceptions, but it also unravels the complexities of class, race, gender, and social positioning in education. Lee Pearcy’s story begins with the 1957 desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School and its aftermath, describing how growing up in this environment shaped his academic and personal life.
As he came to study Latin and then Classics, Pearcy’s education intersected with the student disturbances at Columbia University in 1968 and a feminist revolution that brought significant numbers of women into the classical professoriate. He gives a first-hand account of a scandalous episode in the toxic administrative culture that characterized the classics department at the University of Texas in the 1980s. Against the background of these events, he unfolds his own education as a classicist and his development from apprentice to journeyman to confident teacher of Latin and Greek. Practicing Classics will engage readers who care about American education, classical studies, or the ways that choices, chances, and contingencies shaped one man’s life.
Table of Contents:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword by James J. O’Donnell
Chapter 1 TIMBER: Little Rock, 1947–1961
Chapter 2 PIVOTING: Little Rock and Andover, 1962–1965
Chapter 3 THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY: Little Rock and New York, 1965–1968
Chapter 4 LEARNING THE CRAFT: New York, 1968–1971
Chapter 5 APPRENTICE: New York and Bryn Mawr, 1970–1973
Chapter 6 JOURNEYMAN: Northfield, 1973–1977
Chapter 7 THE UNWORTHINESS OF THE MINISTERS: Austin, Oxford, and Austin, 1977–1985
Chapter 8 THE SHAPE OF A NICHE: The Episcopal Academy, 1985–2013
Index
About the Author :
Lee T. Pearcy retired from the Episcopal Academy, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania in 2013 and is a Research Associate in Classics at Bryn Mawr College.
Review :
“A thoughtful and highly readable memoir. It is also the best recent demonstration I’ve seen of the mental equipment a liberal arts education—when it takes—can provide for life in the real world. Lee Pearcy’s education clearly took. His memoir, aptly titled Practicing Classics, tracks but never labors the intersection of his philosophical and analytical training with the rocky realities of professional classics over the last fifty years. We see him using the intellectual and emotional skills developed in studying his subject to survive the job market, a notorious departmental scandal, tenure decisions, and the daily ins and outs of the life of a faculty member. His account of benefiting from the same tools as he grows into his ultimate vocation as both a classical scholar and a secondary school Latin teacher is my favorite part of the book.”
“Readers will leave Practicing Classics as better persons, having learned from Lee Pearcy the importance of combining what we know with who we want to be. By the time Pearcy left Little Rock for college in the North, he already knew Latin and segregation and what happens when ethics collide with institutions. By choosing which teachers and texts to admire, he came to see the field of classical studies as spacious enough to host his many interests and, in time, to shape his vocation out of his belief that teaching is among the most humane relationships in life.”
“Part memoir, part social history, Pearcy’s Practicing Classics explores the conjunction between the everyday turns of fate that constitute life and the intangible rewards of a life well lived. The book is elegiac, in both senses of the word: a love letter to studying and teaching classics, and a reflection of an academic world that is disappearing even as we speak. The American classics profession of the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of the academic ‘star’ system and its gradual decline, the infiltration of the formerly pristine Senior Common Rooms of the university by younger generations of non-elite scholars, and the slow but steady transformation of education from the fulfillment of intellectual aspiration to economic product. Pearcy puts places and names to the story, thereby evoking an image of the recent past of classics that is simultaneously clear-eyed and nostalgic.”
