Dr Emily Matters, Head of Classics, Pymble Ladies College -‐ address given 27 May 2016 at A Celebration of Classical Greek Teaching at the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA), University of Sydney
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen I am honoured to be asked to address such a distinguished gathering and to celebrate the teaching of Classical Greek. The timing is most fortuitous – only last week the new draft national curriculum framework for classical languages, with specific curricula for Latin and Classical Greek, was launched for public consultation. This is the product of many months of work and many years of lobbying, not without some opposition. So far, funding has only been granted for Years 7-‐10, in contrast to other language subjects which have been written to cover Foundation (Kindergarten) to Year 10. On the other hand, the provision for a classical languages framework allows for the future inclusion of other classical languages, such as Hebrew and Sanskrit (already taught in NSW), and possibly Classical Arabic, Classical Chinese if there is demand for these. There is great cause to celebrate: for the first time students anywhere in Australia will have access to a curriculum in Classical Greek, which at present is taught only in NSW and Victoria, and examined only in NSW. Please feel free to log in to the ACARA site and add your comments during the consultation period. In a gathering like this, there is no need for me to recite the reasons for learning Classical Greek, or to praise the contributions of ancient Greece to the creation of a civilised world. All this is well known to you. Instead, I am going to focus on an aspect which is often the source of controversy – why teach Classical Greek at school level? The enrolments are bound to be small, and surely those who want to learn it can take it up at university just as well? Like many of those present, I myself began Greek at this university. My school did not offer it, but I pestered my Latin teacher to lend me a book from which I learned the alphabet and a few initial steps. At university, I undertook the fearsome challenge of Elementary Greek, taught by the remarkable, ageless Mr Olaf Kelly. It was indeed a challenge to go from the basics to Euripides and Xenophon in one year, and I think that only about 7 from the original class of 40 made it to the end. It was a golden age to be learning Greek at Sydney University, with Professor George Shipp, the famous Homeric scholar and Dr Athenasius Treweek, that phenomenal linguist. Professor Shipp once saw me in his Plato lecture with a Penguin Classics edition and remarked gently “I am sad to see a student with a translation.” I never brought it again. Dr Treweek, in between remarks about Hittite and other languages I had never heard of, would prove that he was truly ambidextrous by writing on the blackboard simultaneously in Greek and English. So is that where the teaching of Classical Greek belongs – in a great university, taught by eminent scholars to eager, diligent, linguistically talented young people? If that is the case, then those who opposed the spending of public money on producing school curricula for
Dr Emily Matters, Head of Classics, Pymble Ladies College -‐ address given 27 May 2016 at A Celebration of Classical Greek Teaching at the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA), University of Sydney
such subjects were right! School authorities that removed Classical Greek in favour of more popular subjects were right! Of course I don’t agree with this – and indeed have spent much of a long career refuting such views, and justifying the teaching of Classical Greek to secondary school students. My view is that not only does this subject bestow incomparable benefits on those who elect to study it, but its inclusion in the school enriches the general curriculum and the experience of all students and teachers in that community. The rationale for the draft Classical Languages Framework states in part: “The study of classical languages exercises students’ intellectual curiosity, strengthens their intellectual, analytical and reflective capabilities, and enhances creative and critical thinking. Through their reading, analysis and translation of texts, students of Classical languages develop their thinking processes, such as close attention to detail, precision, accuracy, memory and logic.....They gain a deep understanding of literature dealing with enduring moral and social issues, such as the conflict between individual freedom and the common good of society....” These are big claims. When the writing team, of which I was a member, put forward these statements, it aroused some scepticism. I have the greatest admiration for Dr Tracey McAskill, Curriculum Manager for ACARA, who, because she did not have any background in classical languages herself, took a day to visit classes in Greek and Latin at the school where I teach and sat in lessons at various levels. I asked her for some feedback on her experience, and she wrote, “I was extremely impressed with the high level of literacy demonstrated by the students, their deep knowledge of the etymology of words, their appreciation of culture and heritage and above all else, their superior problem-‐solving skills.” In short, Tracey was able to observe the instilling of the seminal competencies that underpin the Australian Curriculum. These observations will not be a surprise to many of you. You know that students of Classical Greek benefit greatly from their studies. But their numbers, in the senior years, are quite small, and they are usually students of high ability anyway. How does offering Classical Greek in a secondary school impact on the education of the school as a whole? The best way of demonstrating this, I think, is to describe some experiences from my own career as a classics teacher in various secondary schools with both boys and girls, in independent and in government schools. On several occasions, I have been asked by the Head of Drama to come to his Year 12 class who were studying a Greek tragedy and talk to them about Greek theatre, the mythological background to the story, and any aspects of the play I thought significant. I remember doing this one time for Medea, and in the course of whatever I was saying I read a passage aloud
Dr Emily Matters, Head of Classics, Pymble Ladies College -‐ address given 27 May 2016 at A Celebration of Classical Greek Teaching at the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA), University of Sydney
from the Penguin Classics translation to illustrate my point. This produced very puzzled looks from the class, and one student asked, “How come the words you read were different from the words in our book?” I replied that I was using a different translation from the Cambridge edition they had. This remark produced great consternation. “What do you mean – a different translation? Are there different versions of this play?” I realised that I had to go back to basics: “You see,” I said, “this play was actually written in Greek, not in English. Different people have tried to translate it into English, using the best words they can. But there is no fixed English version.” Mouths dropped open all around the room, and I realised that although this was a Year 12 Drama class studying Medea for the HSC, they had not taken in the fact that this work was composed in another language, and that different translators had grappled with the task of transmitting both the meaning and the spirit of the original Greek. On another occasion, the set play was Oedipus the King, and I had fun explaining the meaning of the name “Oedi-‐pus” and then the frequent puns in the play on the verb “οἶδα” and its relative the aorist verb “ἰδεῖν”. I related the latter to the noun ”idea” which of course we have taken from Greek and explained that it was parallel to the word “vision” in the contemporary usage of that word to denote a concept. Oedipus, in short, was blind to the truth because he literally had “no idea”. A different kind of enrichment was the Heritage Chapel service held at my current school a few years ago. This service was held to commemorate the Jewish festival of Shavuot and its Christian derivative “Pentecost”. The idea was to hold the service in the three languages in use in Jesus’ time, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The Ten Commandments were read by some Jewish students in Hebrew, a passage from the New Testament was read in Greek by Greek students and the Lord’s Prayer was said in Latin. Appropriate hymns were sung in all three languages. The whole school heard this service and the explanations that went with it, and it was a unique learning experience for all. In three different schools, on occasions several years apart, the Classical Greek students were prominent in organising a whole-‐school, transdisciplinary celebration we called the Pythian Games. This was an opportunity for performances and contests in all disciplines as well as athletics, highlighting the ancient Greek origins of our education system. The Greek students performed opening and closing ceremonies with a hymn to Apollo, students were encouraged to nominate “heroes” for each academic discipline, and a good time was had by all. Drama, music, English, history are all subjects where a connection can easily be established, and the availability of Classical Greek teachers and students is a ready resource to enrich the teaching of these subjects. But there are more subtle enrichments happening all the time when Classical Greek is taught at your school. “We did the inert gases in Science,” said a student, “and there was one called ‘argon’. I told the class it means ‘lazy’ in Greek, so that’s why it is a suitable name.” “How come we say that pentagons and hexagons have five or six
Dr Emily Matters, Head of Classics, Pymble Ladies College -‐ address given 27 May 2016 at A Celebration of Classical Greek Teaching at the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA), University of Sydney
sides, when the Greek says they have five/six angles? Or does that come to the same thing?” “When the book talks about the women chatting while they did their weaving, is this why we talk about “spinning a yarn”, “unravelling the plot”, or the “thread of the narrative”? What about the students who study Classical Greek for only a year or two, and who don’t complete the secondary course? These students have not reached the stage of reading an original text, except in tiny fragments encountered along the way. What benefits have these students gained? They have learned many things about a complex language, about cases, genders and agreement of adjectives, and something about the difficulties of translating from one language to another. They have learned to analyse the way words are put together, and that a single letter can change the meaning of the whole sentence. They have learned to pay close attention to detail – just getting the general vibe will not do. They have learned something about gender roles, slavery, subsistence farming, religion and ritual, national identity, hospitality, and the development, advantages and abuses of democracy, oligarchy and tyranny. They have learned that every English word has a story behind it. They have heard and read a number of famous myths and legends, which they are now equipped to recognise and identify in paintings, sculpture, opera, drama, poetry and fiction. They have rich material for their own original creative work. I could talk about so many things: the dyslexic students who have great difficulty with English reading and spelling, but have a fresh start with the Greek alphabet and a language that is far more phonetic than English; the student who painted a beautiful picture of Penelope yearning for Odysseus, with the loom in the background; reading Homer aloud, at the teacher’s request, in Greek to history students learning about Troy; learning an indigenous language, Gamilaraay, which boasts pronouns in 5 cases and singular, dual, plural, and then teaching it to indigenous students from north-‐western NSW. I could talk about the symposion we hosted for Year 12 students from many schools, or the oral story telling of myths that enthrals Year 7. But you get the idea. What can we do to improve the profile of Classical Greek in schools? First of all, we need user-‐friendly textbooks that are every bit as colourful and attractive as textbooks in other subjects. Athenaze recently came out in a new edition which is a significant improvement, but it is still not child-‐friendly. Gorilla Greek, by Ann Wright, a privately produced text for younger students, cleverly links Greek with all the other subjects in the curriculum, but it is not really a course book. John Taylor’s Greek for GCSE (2003) looks dry and forbidding and doesn’t include any culture. The American courses are invariably aimed at a college audience. We need a course that does for Greek what the Cambridge Latin Course does for Latin – authentic stories, lots of illustrations and photographs, and clear, systematic linguistic instruction. A course written for Australian students, with reference to local
Dr Emily Matters, Head of Classics, Pymble Ladies College -‐ address given 27 May 2016 at A Celebration of Classical Greek Teaching at the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA), University of Sydney
conditions and indigenous stories, would be a refreshing bonus. Increasingly I have found that Greek attracts students who have not studied Latin, and that one should not assume any familiarity with Latin grammar. A great advantage is that Greek does not have the negative or elitist reputation that persists with Latin even today, and one does not have to work to break that down. Some of my most successful Greek students have never studied Latin. Secondly, we need a higher profile, and tonight is a good start. We are custodians of an incredible treasure, and we must not be like the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece, or the cobra guarding the King’s Treasure in Kipling’s Jungle Book, defiantly surrounded by the bones of those who tried to approach. We must take our example from the story of the loaves and fishes, and from tiny resources find that we can feed thousands. We must not shut ourselves away in ivory towers, focusing on a small group of high achievers. I would like to see Classical Greek clubs in many schools, with the possibility of extension into regular classes, even outside the timetable. I would like Greek classes specifically for Latin teachers, focusing first on the Greek they need to teach Latin authors like Virgil. Classical Greek will never be a mass subject, but it needs to stop being a niche subject. It needs to be a subject that school principals will fight to include in their schools, because of the visible benefits its teachers and students bring to their school communities.
