Also, Americans love to read about the failure of individuals, as is evident with Augustine and Rousseau. Furthermore, The Education is considered a classic, because it represents an individual's way of life in a given period of American history. There are many opposing viewpoints given by Charles Eliot (the author of Harvard Classics) against Adams in Thomas" article, but Eliot says that a classic can be an autobiographical work: "Like Adams, Eliot felt that stories of people's lives help fulfill his educational purposes." Adams does this frequently in The Education. Moreover, Eliot is in compliance with The Education when he uses "the lives of great men to mark nodal points in history." Adams uses the same technique. Thomas Brook is right when he assumes that Adams thinks that classical education is an unredeemable failure. "Henry Adams lived in a world in which various fields of force influenced politics, but, as far as he could see, a classical past was not the dominant one." Adams says of his Harvard education, "Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from the ancient languages." Adams believes in the republican classical tradition: a student must understand classical times from the perspective of the classical time itself. This way of thinking can only be accomplished if the student actually learns the ancient language. However, this education does not work with 20th century thinking. The reform that Adams was given was that of Charles Eliot. Eliot believes in progressive education: "the classical tradition has been created by a perpetual transmission of its (the classical) substance from one generation to the next." "Eliot's evolutionary model implies that the present, civilized generation is the product of the classical tradition's last translation through time." Unfortunately, only a percentage of the population is able to understand this translation, since it is they who were born with the innate sense to read the classics.