Classics

In Kyle’s reading of John Quincy Adams, “the classics” name the curricular core of the Adams family theory of Education — not a subject like geography or history, but “a lens through which to examine and understand the life around you.” John and Abigail Adams held that intellect taught without morality was pointless, and built JQA’s formation around classics, Scripture, and ancient history (Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, Sallust, Thucydides). The same frame recurs in Adams’s later life: he revered Cicero as “the highest human achievement save for the revelation of Scripture” and advised his son Charles to “make him the study of your whole life,” using a shared reading list of the classics to forge intellectual friendship across the family.

Context: “The classics” conventionally refers to the literature, philosophy, history, and rhetoric of ancient Greece and Rome, long the backbone of elite Western education and especially of the republican civic curriculum in the early American republic.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — the classics as the Adams family’s lens-based theory of education and moral formation, and as Adams’s lifelong intellectual touchstone (Cicero above all).