Lapham’s Quarterly
Most graduation advice—whether given in boom times or moments of crisis—depicts a future replete with untrammeled ground and endless unknowns. And if you take a look at commencement addresses from the past, you’ll see a glimpse of what people in power told privileged young people to believe in and sketches of what the future could be, which we can now consider next to the reality of what came next. Lapham’s Quarterly is revisiting the history of giving advice to graduates and others in the process of acquiring knowledge or skills.
John Stuart Mill’s early childhood education prioritized the basics—ancient Greek and Roman history, tomes on arithmetic, Don Quixote for dessert. It wasn’t until the age of twelve, armed with years of reading, that he dove into serious works of rhetoric and logic. (For those skeptical that any of the aforementioned texts have much to offer someone who had lived so little, the philosopher admits in his Autobiography that “most of these reflections were beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the time, but they left seed behind, which germinated in due season.”) One of the thinkers he read for the first time at the age of twelve was Quintilian.
Owing to his obscure style and to the scholastic details of which many parts of his treatise are made up, [he] is little read and seldom sufficiently appreciated. His book is a kind of encyclopedia of the thoughts of the ancients on the whole field of education and culture, and I have retained through life many valuable ideas which I can distinctly trace to my reading of him, even at that early age.
