How Would You Rate Your Classical Education?

TLDR: How many old arse white and male authors have you read?

I'm the son of a librarian turned professor at the University of Alabama and a football/basketball/track coach. It seems I grew up at school. Three o'clock hit and I went to the library to hang out with Mom until practice was over (if I wasn't on the field or track myself).

Later when my mother got her doctorate it was an hour trip to Tuscaloosa where I hung out in the Gorgas library until she finished teaching her classes (she taught on the fifth floor in the now defunct media science department).

I'm a lifelong reader, but when I was younger I was voracious. I read things way above my comprehension and experience. Locke, Aurelius, Rousseau, Voltaire, Humme, Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, Adams, etc.

This was a research library. I don't think they had anything published post 1960. So, I read the classics.

Now, I also read classic fiction like Dumas, Hugo, Sabbatini, Verne, Tolkien, etc. But they were the CLASSICS.

When you're stuck in a library for 5 hours for 5 days a week when the internet was still text based and driven by FTP, Telnet and Gopher, what else do you do?

Anyway, at damn near 40 now, I'm surprised at the amount of things people haven't read -- things I consider the very foundation of our society.

Ask the average person who John Locke is and they are likely to answer, "I know the name. Now, who does he coach for?"

I was lucky to have the parents I did in middle and coastal Alabama.

But since y'all Louisiana folks go to mostly private schools, were these authors in your core curriculum or did you have to seek them out on your own?