I looked up older Latin grammar books, and their definitions of nouns and adjectives were rooted in Aristotelian philosophy (a noun substantive is a thing that exists in itself (aka a substance) and a noun adjective describes a thing that cannot exist in itself but must be joined to a substance).

His article is pessimistic in part because so many people seek out some kind of traditional classical ed in an effort to recover the culture that went with it. They don't know what the that culture is like, though they desperately want to, and since education is formative, they latch onto traditional classical ed as a means of forming both themselves and their kids in that alien-to-them culture. (A few years ago, I was right there with them - figuring out what to do when everything you know is wrong - wanting to do something different than what you know, because all you know is wrong - that's hard and frustrating. It's easy to idealize what you aspire to as a magic bullet.)

Anyway, Hicks' point is that the classical teacher must *already* be formed by the classical tradition before they can pass it on to their students. You can't just rotely follow-without-understanding a classical curriculum and expect it to magically have imparted the culture that formed it to you. You have to have recovered the tradition yourself before you can impart it to others. And it's very hard to recover a tradition without seeing it lived out - it's very hard to recover a tradition without being part of a community that is living it out. And HIcks argues that there are very few communities in the West that are living it out. There are significant differences between modern Western culture and premodern classical Christian culture, and too much contemporary traditional classical ed ends up just applying modern Western assumptions to classical education, which mostly just forms students in modern Western culture and largely fails to do much to form students in the premodern classical Christian culture they were aiming for. And people don't realize it, because they don't know what they don't know.

Hicks is very pessimistic about people's attempts to recover the culture *through* classical education - his main point is that the culture has to be in place *before* kids can be successfully educated in it. But that culture is largely lost in this time and place, and so you are in a catch-22: you have to already have what you are trying to recover in order to successfully recover it in the first place :doh. If you don't understand the ideas and assumptions that animate a given curricula or approach, then no matter how perfectly it embodies them, you can still screw it up by importing your own foreign ones :doh.

I've been working for nearly four years now on trying to recover a premodern sacramental Christian worldview and culture. (I was doing so because I believed it was a more Biblical way to understand the world than the modern assumptions I had - it had nothing to do with classical ed (it actually supplanted my previous interest in traditional classical ed); but as it turns out, it was very similar to the worldview and culture of premodern classical Christian education.) It took me about two years before I really had any real understanding of what I was seeking. But now I think I have enough of a fledgling understanding to at least start to have a sense of what I don't know, and enough that I can learn more as I go - there's enough of a foundation for that. So I'm somewhat less pessimistic than Hicks - yeah, you can't rely on classical education to itself form you in the foreign culture and worldview that it embodies. But you *can* learn it elsewhere - it's just hard and time-consuming. I'm not sure it's possible outside of Christian communities that still retain some connection to the living tradition of the past - you need some kind of starting point, and some kind of living example. I did it mostly through books and the internet, but I was reading both recent authors who are wrestling with similar issues in similar communities as me, and the older authors who offered alternative views. And I was part of a living church body that was at least trying to stay connected to the Western Christian tradition.