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Nothing wrong with LARPing as a Victorian gentleman, and in many ways a worthy goal for an individual in a world that is decidedly against many aspects of that. As a goal for an educational curriculum that's supposed to prepare youth to be citizens, leaders, and humanistic contributors to be members of Western society, I'm less sure. It's almost certainly better than what we have now, but it's also a system that produced, in large part, the generation that allowed Europe to commit collective suicide in the First World War. Maybe it's not fair to pin the blame on the war on the education system, but the way the European elite were educated during that era certainly influenced the propaganda, mass hysteria, and doubling down that allowed the war to get so out of hand.
All this being said, I think your LARP is good for both you and for the community. It is good to go church, the Opera, museums, play sports, and read old books. There are plenty of countervailing influences in society that want to shove the things I believe are absent from these lists in your face (although they never seem to choose actually good books/media from any of these categories). I just worry that as an ethic to guide society it's incomplete, which is perhaps true of any system we could come up with (José Ortega y Gasset seemed to think so at least).
In terms of the first novel, may I introduce the "Golden Ass" by Apuleius as another contender. It as episodic as Don Quijote, but also contains an overarching plot that I think would qualify it as a novel. And it was published in the 2nd century AD. It has elements of what we might consider post-modernism (nothing new under the sun), while still forming a bridge between antiquity and more modern novels.
In my mind Don Quixote is the first novel because the literary tradition that would follow all flows through Cervantes. Stuff like Genji or The Golden Ass or Daphnis and Chloe all have a good argument for being examples of the form that came before Cervantes, and influenced Cervantes, and novel is kind of a vague concept anyway. But I'll return to the Columbus analogy: there's various stories of various European explorers, or occasionally Zheng He, traveling to the Americas; but Columbus is still the guy because his trip lead to continuous open communication with the new world. In the same way, writers had occasionally written stuff that was novel-like without it leading to a continuous flow of novels being written, but it was after Cervantes that the novel becomes a continuous great form written consistently, and the Quixote and the works it influenced would influence all later novels.
It seems odd to blame the classical European educational system for WWI destroying the world of the classical European educational system. Everything that was worth saving about that world was built by the men who had gone through that system.
And at any rate, St. John's is under no illusions that it is anything other than a set of weirdoes preserving a tradition. They have no need to think about what the world would be like if everyone tried to go to St. John's, or if a hundred other colleges chose to imitate the curriculum. It's not going to happen, not anytime soon. We're not in any danger of suddenly returning to strict standards. The fact that anyone is preserving these strict standards means something.
I hear your point on reading widely and encouraging exploration, but too often that turns into a standard's-free slopfest. At 33, I can balance that literary diet pretty well naturally, without resorting too heavily to listicles, my mind craves Plato and Gibbon; at 16 we need to be working on nurturing a good palette in our young men, and that is going to require some degree of forcing them to read the right stuff. In my mind, your ability to interpret and explore is improved by being immersed in a canon, really any canon. My choice is the classical anglo-high-culture canon because that is my culture, but it is more about taking a bite out of one cohesive set of works as a base from which you can digest other works. China has its own canon of literature and philosophy that can be imbibed profitably. I've heard the Russian Canon praised in that the important works from Pushkin to Pasternak can be read in an industrious year or two.
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