If our schoolchildren were forced to read some of the classics, I wonder how different things might be in America today.

I'm not so sure. I'm a student at St. John's College, where the sophmores just got done reading Plutarch's Cato the Younger, Caesar, Antony, and Brutus.

In the Seminar discussions that followed, I was amazed by how many students, who claim to hate tyranny, given their fairly extreme views on Bush, but were quite the fans of both Caesar and Antony, and against Cato and Brutus. It was mind-boggling. I and one other of my classmates were basically the only ones defending the defenders of the Roman Republic.