Senior Fellow Angel Adams Parham and Annika Prather, co-authors of The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature, offer a spirited defense of classical education against those who claim that the tradition must be set aside to avoid perpetuating a persistent Eurocentricism, writing:
“In this increasingly polarized debate, both sides reveal an astonishing lack of historical understanding combined with a lamentable lack of imagination. Have the classics and classical education at times been used to exclude and oppress? They certainly have. Is exclusion and oppression innate to an education steeped in the history and literature of the Mediterranean crossroads? Certainly not.”