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Notes -
It is interesting Scruton calls the classics irrelevant information. I would call something like trivia and the accumulation of facts irrelevant, and I’d say the classics are filled with potentially relevant stories and solutions, and the learning of Ancient languages as taught created analytic and organized minds.
Our history today is largely filled with irrelevance, as there is no future applicability for knowing precise dates, names, and figures. The trivialization of learning is bad for brain snd soul and I think Jeopardy is the worst possible pastime. The Ancient histories contain inaccurate figures (60,000 perished… no, 100,000!), but the importance lies in the human stories and connections and the emphasis on faults and learning from human error. Great Man -styled history is nothing other than maximizing the utility of a history lesson for individual humans. Save the trivia for specialized excel workers, our leaders deserve Great Man theory!
In that article Scruton was arguing against an educational model focused on only teaching “relevant” things, as defined by the worldview of the teacher. So he was adopting their framework when saying that there is benefit to teach “irrelevant” things. I highly doubt he actually believes that those things are irrelevant in the broader sense.
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Shamus Khan wrote a book - Privilege - exploring his education (both his own and the one he bestowed when he returned as a teacher) and he touches on the utility provided by such absurdly broad courses as "Western History"
His argument is that it's not so much teaching information as teaching ease: an ability to navigate a bunch of different cultural spheres and their products. Nobody ever really learns much about Western Civ in a high school class. But they learn how to navigate material and to not feel absolutely overwhelmed (or, less charitably: they learn how to bullshit according to the system's expectations)
We can apply the same logic to even more challenging endeavors like learning the classics or ancient Greek.
Of course, I think this misses a more obvious take: the "ease" being learned is about learning to fluently speak language of your fellow elites and civilization (hence the Iliad and not the Upanishads, which I don't doubt have meaningful human stories) but part of the book is about the changing character of the upper class so I guess it's not a bug.
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