Ben Cole .....
.....attended Sherborne School, an independent school in Dorset. He started learning Latin at age ten and Greek at fourteen:
" Studying inflected languages like Latin and Ancient Greek clarifies your thinking. You become much more aware of the structure of an argument, but because it's a language you are studying you're always also experiencing a living culture. I would say that Classics allows one to witness the birth of the modern world, the world we see around us, its architecture, literature, philosophy and so on. I enjoy the immediacy of these texts written so long ago, their undiminished capacity to conjure up an individual human being with a pen trying to capture the essential nature of things as it still applies to us, and this despite the huge gulf in time between us and them. The age of Oxford makes it seem a natural place to study ancient material. Literae Humaniores, the Classics degree, has such a long history here it seems to have worked its way into the very stonework of the place. The past is all around you in Oxford.
" In the tutorial you are treated as an equal by a world expert, and this focus on the individual student and the intensity of the teaching system is tremendously invigorating intellectually. The best tutorial is a mental workout in which you are encouraged to think in ways you had not thought before, and you do so because there is no one to hide behind. Tutorials have provided me with a great opportunity to express myself and my opinions. The system has broadened my mind and seems to have increased my self-confidence as well. University lectures are a very different type of teaching, but they complement the tutorial. There is an atmosphere of intellectual excitement and collective involvement in a really good lecture that can't be matched."
© C@O 2003: Classics at Oxford, Faculty of Classics.
Webmaster.
Last updated:
February 15, 2007.
Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles', Oxford, OX1 3LU.