Greek, Too:
Presentation to the
California Classical Association
by Richard Evans
These remarks, advocating Greek instruction in Latin courses, will
address first, the published facts about the state of Greek enrollment at
the secondary level and inferences from those facts, and then more
anecdotally, will relate some of my personal efforts to integrate Greek in
Latin courses.
As good a place as any to begin an empirical assessment of the state of
school Greek in both the West and South is with bald remark of the late Ed
Phinney, based on a 1994 survey that he conducted in conjunction with the
National Greek Examination and reported in an article in The Classical
Journal, “Greek 2000- Crisis, Challenge, Deadline”: “As a whole, the South
and West are not areas where Greek is available at the high school level”
(411).
Lest university professors of Classics begin to feel too comfortable at
this point, although their circumstances are far better (simply because
some study of Greek is better than no study of Greek), we note the lament,
even if somewhat rhetorical, of Victor Hanson and John Heath in Who Killed
Homer: “Greek is disappearing from the college curriculum” (xix).
Statistics bear out Professors Hanson and Heath despite the many excellent
classics departments spread over the Western and Southern United States:
As of 1995, Greek accounted for .113 per cent of university-level
enrollments (La Fleur, “Latina Resurgens” 126).
The remark of Hanson and Heath sounds ominously like a similar
statement regarding high school Greek, made by James Turney Allen in the
preface to his 1917 textbook, the First Year of Greek: “However
regrettable it may seem, during the past decade or so Greek has come to be
in this country largely a college subject.” What Hanson and Heath see
happening today in universities, Allen noted happening in American high
schools between 1910-1920. Is the history of Greek in American schools of
the early 20th century doomed to repeat itself in our colleges and
universities at the beginning of the 21st? Logic dictates that there must
be some sort of connection between the virtual extinction of Greek in
schools eighty years ago and receding university enrollments now: Clearly,
the fewer students who go to college with no exposure to Greek, the fewer
who will think of it as a real option for study at university. Do
university classics professors need to be concerned about the growth of
Greek at the school level? The self-interested answer can be nothing other
than absolutely “yes”. A bubble-up of interest in Greek from school to
college levels could be a welcome boon to lagging enrollments higher up
the ladder.
To come at this issue from a different angle, one not specifically
oriented to classics, but reflecting on the situation of classics within a
broader spectrum of literary culture, we may turn to a book used to
introduce students to the discipline of comparative literature,
Comparative Literature, A Critical Introduction, by Susan Bassnett, a
translation theorist. Commenting on the shifting historical position of
classical languages within the European literary landscape, Bassnett
remarks:
Whereas a Browning or a Pushkin had read works in various languages
without thinking twice about it, a century later the ability to read in
several languages was beginning to be considered a sign of exceptional
intelligence and education. Where once knowledge of Greek and Latin was
fundamental for any educated European, so by the 1920’s that pattern had
changed radically and by the 1990’s knowledge of Greek and Latin is
limited to a small specialist group. (43)
It is significant to see how other academicians perceive our discipline
and its scope, yet the assessment of an observant non-specialist seems to
square with views from inside the field, and both perspectives paint an
unsettling picture of the present state of Greek studies, at least in
terms of the absolute numbers of students learning the language and its
literature.
Finding an accurate count of the real numbers of high school students
in Greek, however, is difficult and, at this point, and not very
scientific because of limited and partial reporting, a situation which, in
itself, tends to reflect the small numbers of this marginalized activity
in our information-saturated society. Whenever there are major numerical
trends to report, particularly in education, some number-gathering
organization is more than willing to collect and publish the figures. As
far as there is evidence available for school Greek enrollments in 2000,
Richard LaFleur published the following figures in “Latin and Greek in
American Schools and College: An Enrollment Update”:
ACTFL reported only 928 students in high school Greek for 1994. This
figure may reflect some under-reporting, since, for example, Greek is
sometimes taught gratis by a dedicated Latin teacher during a “free”
period or as an after-school class; and of course, the ACTFL survey
excludes thousands of private schools around the country, including
Christian schools, many of which require Greek. Nevertheless, total
Greek enrollments in schools are undeniably low, and the National Greek
Exam (NGE) participation rates have actually declined over the past six
years, from 1,114 in 1994 to 869 in 1999… (101).
A further inference about the current state of Greek in schools can be
drawn from the 2001 job advertisement list on the ACL website. Of the jobs
advertisements for school classics positions posted, typically fewer than
ten percent mention Greek as part of their classics programs. Although
these advertised positions are not a scientific sample of the proportion
of schools that offer Greek as part of a classics program, the
persistently small number of total advertised school positions with a
Greek component does seem in line with all the published information
suggesting the unfortunate marginality of Greek at the secondary level.
Now that we have surveyed the evidence, much of which seems depressing,
we come to the critical question of what we as teachers and professors of
classics can do to move Greek to a more visible place, to excite wider
interest, to encourage school students to begin to learn the language and
to offer them that opportunity, to promote full classics, not one-legged
classics, especially at the school level. (I do not mean to preclude the
university sector here, but most classics departments at the university
level do offer Greek, even if it is not well enrolled, whereas, as we have
shown, this is not the case in schools.) The most powerful resource for
reviving Greek in schools is the Latin/classics teacher. This seems a
trite statement, indeed, but the truth is sometimes very ordinary.
To recall again well-known facts, we remember that two of the most
significant teachers of the Western educational tradition, a Athenian
philosopher, Socrates, and a Jewish rabbi, Jesuha, although they wrote
nothing themselves, forged cultural history: They made not just an impact
on their own times but they founded movements that continue to this day.
Their distinguished disciples, Plato and Paul of Tarsus, teachers who did
publish (both in Greek, interestingly enough), contributed formatively to
their respective movements with definitive and unalterable effect.
Teachers can and do form culture, as our intellectual history reminds us.
As teachers of classics, at whatever level, we are well positioned to
be part of the educational reform movement that is engaging the country at
present. We are masters of an academic discipline of venerable tradition,
with an international community of scholars and teachers, with an
intellectual scope and substance to offer true knowledge in the basic
areas of grammar, rhetoric and logic as well as many more advanced fields
of historical and literary endeavor. Our discipline, properly learned,
promotes a multilingual, critical consciousness of considerable power and
a multicultural view of the world. We are most cosmopolitan,
diachronically and synchronically; we are positioned for educational
leadership.
As a group, we share the good fortune of an expansive growth in school
Latin enrollments (LaFleur, “Latina Resurgens” 127-128) and explosive
growth in the Latin Advanced Placement Examination program: “Between 1994
and 1999 the number of College board Advanced placement Latin exam
participants increased over 49%, from 3,768 to 5,624…” (LaFleur, “Latin
and Greek in American Schools and Colleges” 102). Against this flourishing
of Latin, Greek, as we know, in our regions of the West and South has not
made a good showing. With so much interest in Latin, however, how can the
Greek contribution to the development of Roman literature and intellectual
history go unnoticed? Classicists, even aggressive Latinists, cannot
ignore the contribution of Hellenism to Rome if they are intellectually
honest. All Latin students, then, need to be aware of the contribution of
Greek to the Latin language and especially to the development of Latin
literature (Evans, “A Call for Greek in Schools” 13).
To solve the problem of the demise of school Greek, in part, is simply
for high school Latin teachers to piggyback some Greek onto every Latin
class at appropriate openings in the course. This simple approach may seem
to a burden or an intrusion into the Latin curriculum, but objections
reflect more on our ideology as pedagogues than on substantive problems
with minor adjustments to our syllabi. We have been schooled to think of
Greek and Latin as related, yet pedagogically separated entities. Most of
us learned Greek in separate classes, after all. This traditional
segregation of Latin from Greek is both confirmed as the normal state and
seemingly affirmed by the language of the Standards of Classical Language
Learning (American Classical League, 1997). For example, in the five goals
for learning discussed on pages 7-16 of the Standards, the phrase “Greek
or Latin” occurs no less than 43 times, whereas I find no example of the
phrase “Greek and Latin” in these pages. This phraseology gives the
strongest impression that knowledge of just one or the other language is
an obvious and perhaps even desirable. We teachers and professors can step
out of this mold by rethinking our ideology, by demonstrating Greek as the
linguistic and literary background of Latin literature. Our Latin students
can easily learn the Greek alphabet, some Greek words that come over into
Latin and English. They can by easy analogy compare some aspects of
declensional morphology in Greek and Latin, read a few easy Greek
sentences or mottoes, understand mythological and geographical names in
Greek. A few motivated students might even begin to ask for more, although
most will not end up reading the First Olympian or The Third Olynthiac.
But in sum, if all students of high school and college Latin have even a
limited exposure to Greek, more of these students, no doubt, will explore
Greek as their intellects mature and as they gain a greater insight into
the intellectual roots of contemporary thought, so implicated, as it is,
in Greek origins. This piggyback approach to boosting Greek may appear
somewhat idealistic, but it is truly feasible if professors and teachers
of Latin take the initiative by offering just a bit of relevant Greek in
each Latin class that they teach.
At this point, I would like to comment, more personally, on some of the
techniques that I have tried in order to interest students in Greek
through Latin classes. Over the past five years, I have used successfully
the piggyback approach to Greek through Latin in two schools of very
different characters: one, a large Catholic high school with a two year
language requirement where Latin was struggling to hold its own against an
85% Spanish enrollment in the language area; the other, a K-12 Episcopal
school with a Latin requirement (grades five through twelve) and Greek on
offer as an elective.
At the Catholic school, several students approached me about offering a
Greek class, but after much going around with schedules and administrative
enrollment caps, this venture did not go forward. Yet I was left with a
sense most Latin students would profit from a bit of Greek in order to
appreciate the Roman intellectual and educational experience. Since the
Greek alphabet was already an extra-credit bonus in Latin 1 and 2, I
determined that adding more Greek as enrichment would not be a radical
step. Latin 1 introduced the Greek alphabet, a few basic Greek words which
have English derivatives, names of Greek mythological figures, and a few
easy mottoes or famous quotations in Greek. Latin 2 went forward with the
article, declensions, the verb, to be, and present tense of the omega
verb, together with short sentences and easy verses from the Greek New
Testament with teacher assistance (Evans, “A Call for Greek in Schools”
14-16).
This extra-credit approach to Greek worked well for most students since
there was no penalty for non-participation and bonus points for students
who took extra-credit quizzes on Greek. The primary goal here was to
introduce students to a taste of Greek and stimulate interest for the
future although immediate successes developed. I recall especially one
peak moment when I was discussing the nine Muses with a Latin I class.
Each student came forward to my desk to look at lines 77-79 in Hesiod’s
Theogony which were displayed in Greek on my desktop computer. This group
had gone back to the original naming text and they could read the names of
the Muses in Greek. How many students of Greek mythology today have or
take the opportunity to go to the source of names commonly used in
Greco-Roman mythology?
It was during this period when I was involved in a somewhat beleaguered
Latin program, and I was attempting at the same time to find a place for
Greek in the formal or informal curriculum of my school that I joined
forces with colleagues in the Texas Classical Association to inaugurate
the Greek, Too website: (www.txclassics.org/greek.htm).
Ginny Lindzey, editor of Texas Classics
in Action and Dr. Linda Fleming, chair of Classics at St.Thomas’
Episcopal, supported a joint effort to launch an on-going web initiative
for the promotion of Greek, especially at the secondary level. Teachers of
Greek and Latin, particularly those trying to begin Greek programs or
integrate Greek into their Latin classes, need helpful ideas for
curriculum resources and pedagogical materials in a central clearinghouse.
We are trying to serve that need, and we invite interested instructors of
all levels (university professors, too) to survey our site and make
contributions in the various categories of reviews, texts, pedagogical
articles and a pertinent links to other ancient Greek sites on the web.
In my current position at St. Thomas’ Episcopal School (Houston,
Texas), where Greek is part of the official curriculum, the goals of
piggybacking Greek in Latin classes are primarily directed toward
stimulating enrollments for a growing Greek elective program. My
colleague, Dr. Fleming, and I have held “Greek Week” lessons, introducing
at different levels of the Latin program the Greek alphabet and a few
basic words in order to encourage excellent Latin students who have yet to
try Greek to join the Greek program. Greek week paid off immediately by
recruiting a group of seven to ten 11th-grade students for a senior Greek
reading class that the Headmaster was willing to support.
Another Greek initiative came in a Latin 3 class in which the students
were frankly bored and displeased about their Latin requirement. I had
tried various approaches to foster more interest in Latin, but with little
success. As we worked our way into the First Catilinarian, I determined to
demonstrate to the students the Greek background of Roman rhetoric. I
suggested that extra-credit would be given for writing the names of
rhetorical figures in the original Greek; students perked up and learned
the Greek alphabet, learned to recognize and write in Greek the names of
figures such as anaphora, hyperbaton, anadiplosis,
kokophonia, euphonia, polyptoton, klimax,
paronomasia, polysyndeton, asydeton and metaphora.
These students acquired enough Greek within a three-week period to read,
with teach assistance, some verses from the New Testament illustrating
rhetorical figures under consideration in class. The class attitude became
more positive about reading Cicero and more appreciative of the concepts
of ancient rhetoric. One student reported that she had found the excursion
into Greek the “most interesting part of Latin this year”.
Many areas of Classical Studies offer similar pathways into Greek:
grammar, poetics, mythology, history, geography and topography, theology
and art and archaeology. In these settings where Greek language is not the
focus of the course, learning just the alphabet and a few terms or proper
names will foster further interest among the bright and dedicated students
and leave the average student with, at least, some more appreciation for
the formative impact the Greek language on our contemporary intellectual
world of thought.
_________________
Works Cited
Allen, James. The First Year of Greek. Rev. ed. The Macmillan
Co., 1931.
Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Evans, Richard. “A Call for Greek in Schools: Recovery of a Renaissance
Tradition.” Texas Classics in Action,
Winter 2000: 12-16.
Hanson, Victor and John Heath. Who Killed Homer? The Demise of
Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom. New York: The
Free Press, 1998.
Kitchell, Kenneth, Edward Phinney, Susan Shelmerdine and Marilyn
Skinner. “Greek 2000-Crisis, Challenge,
Deadline.” The Classical Journal, 91.4, (1996): 393-420.
LaFleur, Richard. “Latina Resurgens: Classical Language Enrollments in
American Schools and Colleges.” The Classical Outlook, Vol. 74.4
(1997): 125-130.
LaFleur, Richard. “Latin and Greek in American Schools and Colleges: An
Enrollment Update,” The Classical Outlook, Vol.77.3 (2000):
101-103.
Standards for Classical Language Learning. American Classical
League, 1997.
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