The trouble with these boys is that the masters have been talking to them about the Parthenon when they should have been talking to them about the optative.” So grumbled the grim old classicist after marking some “milk-and-watery entrance papers”. For CS Lewis, the optative (a grammatical mood in classical Greek expressing desire) represents a rigorous, technical and content-based approach to education that begins with “hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody”, while the Parthenon encourages a personal response to culture and literature in a vaguer way, which “begins in ‘Appreciation’ and ends in gush”.