It’s Hardly All Greek to Students

The multicultural dust may finally be settling on the ancient Greeks, those deadest of the Dead White Males supposedly evicted from the cultural center ring over the last three decades by a new national educational focus on minorities, women and non-Western cultures. Despite dire predictions--consider the title of the 1998 book “Who Killed Homer?” by two conservative California classicists--the ancient Greeks are still holding on, if only by their teeth in some cases.

At a recent weeklong seminar about ancient Greece at the University of Maryland, given for Maryland middle and high school teachers, two things are clear: The Greeks have become more foreign and exotic, and now jostle for a place with societies and cultures once deemed “distant” from the United States, such as ancient China and the Islamic world; at the same time, good teachers can keep the Greeks vital by learning how to teach about them surreptitiously.

The Greeks will survive, according to participants, because those who teach about them are learning to do what the Greeks never could do back when they ruled the Mediterranean 2,500 years ago: Adapt.

The seminar, organized by the university’s Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies and co-sponsored by the state Department of Education, brought together two dozen middle and high school teachers for lectures, discussions and workshops with area theater professionals. It attracted a cross-section of teachers.

The seminar was held against the backdrop of changing educational mandates, many of which place an increasing premium on testing and evaluation, and curriculum standards that lay out in detail what students must know and when.

“I wouldn’t say the Greeks have been de-emphasized,” says Nan Collins, a high school art teacher in Maryland. “But there is a new recognition of non-Western cultures and rightly so. The problem is that teachers have had a lot added to their plates, while nothing has been removed,” says Collins, who has taught for 20 years.

Many state guidelines around the country tend to focus high school history and social studies lessons on American history and civics. That leaves ancient Greece primarily as fodder for middle school, after which, unless teachers are creative, it’s entirely possible that students won’t hear any more of it until college.

“The tendency is to cover this material in seventh grade,” says Penny Cipolone, a classics teacher who is also public relations chairwoman for the National Junior Classical League, an organization for students and teachers of Latin and Greek at the middle and high school levels.

“I feel very badly about that, because while there is a lot you can do with younger children, you can’t get them into philosophy or reading theater,” says Cipolone. “I certainly wouldn’t hand a seventh-grader ‘Oedipus.’ And so you end up with a very superficial knowledge of ancient civilization.”

Particularly frustrating for high school teachers, says Collins, is dredging up the mostly forgotten remnants of junior high lessons when it’s necessary to make connections--to show, say, the influence of Athenian democracy on American democracy.

“There’s a huge gap between sixth and ninth grade,” she says. “Even with very bright kids, the foundation isn’t there to make the connections you want to make later on....A lot of teachers feel that they don’t have the time ... to go back and revisit the history.”

The Greeks (and Romans) may also suffer because much of what is most fascinating about them is generally considered well past a PG rating (especially for middle school); it was a society of intellectual complexity, and great violence, and it is riven with sexuality in a way that is difficult to scrub clean for student consumption.

This creates interesting dangers for teachers. One Latin teacher remembers sending a student off to research the vestal virgins--seemingly a safe topic, given that they’re virgins--only to find that the student had downloaded an Internet picture of the god Priapus trying to get his hands on a vestal virgin. “That one did not get included on the poster we were making,” she says.

A persistent question hangs in the air at the seminar: Just how foreign are the ancient Greeks?

In 1985, author Eva C. Keuls described them as “a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect monuments to male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers, sponsor public whorehouses, create a mythology of rape, and engage in rampant saber rattling.” Foreign indeed.

Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath--the authors of “Who Killed Homer?”--took a very different view, arguing that the Greeks, for all their faults, are the source of everything that is good about democracy and capitalism. And so the Greeks remain as they ever were: wildly strange and uncannily familiar, a source of embarrassment and a source of pride.

Except in many middle and high schools, where time constraints and other pressures have left little time to explore the Greeks even as a flash point for cultural controversy. Instead, they’ve become interesting oddities on a vast smorgasbord of ancient and foreign cultures that, some feel, leave them merely ciphers.

At the seminar, there was a sense that the best one can hope to do is deal with the form, rather than the content, of Greek culture. One can show students an ancient amphitheater, but there’s rarely time to actually read a Greek play.

If the Greeks are becoming more foreign and exotic in this country, there’s evidence that they’re being adopted by people seemingly remote from their legacy. Karen Carr, an associate professor of history at Portland State University in Oregon, has created a Web site to introduce students to ancient Greece (www.historyforkids.org). She’s noticed the usual pattern in this country: lots of hits from middle school students, and a smattering of hits from high school students who are reading “The Odyssey” in a literature class. And one other thing: “I would say a third of the visitors are from Hong Kong, China, Singapore, other Asian countries. And they’re very interested.”

Teachers face pressure to move past the Greeks at the same time that schools are trying to concentrate more on what traditionalists consider the greatest legacy of the Greeks: democratic society. “As a result of Sept. 11th, and the sense of being more embattled in a hostile world, there’s a greater concern with what it means to be American and the American legacy,” she says. “And yet there’s a tendency to focus on the shaping of American identity without the roots. It’s an identity cut off from the past, more insular.”