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The Change of Emphasis in Classical Teaching

Willard Reed

There is no doubt that a marked change of emphasis in classical teaching has come about in the last ten or fifteen years. This is in a direction covered by the term "humanistic," aiming to bring ant in the Classics the story, the human and historical interest, at the expense of the grammatical and technical details formerly predominant. The change of which I am speaking has come about indirectly, after a certain reaction from the direct movement for the humanistic cause led by Professor Hale in 1887. Some of Professor Hale's disciples, like most disciples, used methods that poorly represented the wisdom of their master; there ensued the cry that "humanism" ,and guess-work were synonymous, and before long the parroty paradigm returned to power.

Meanwhile, however, other things have happened. Teachers have organized in other departments than ours, have seized a large share of the field thrown open by the elective system, and have set a high standard of vitality in teaching. In our own branches, archaeologists have come forward with fascinating tales from the Forum and Crete; and text-books have undergone a more marked change than in any like period. Photographs, the historical treatment, the text broken by narrative topics, selections so wisely chosen as to increase interest without destroying unity, even the daring relinquishment of the vocative and the dual-- these are all changes with which you are familiar.

Finally, the classical teachers of the great heart of the conntry, the Mississippi valley, ave led the way for us in departmental organization, and have shown in the vigorous new classical Journal a marked leaning to the broadest conception of our work. I hope that this Association will from the start uphold the same conception. I hope that it will accept no definition of classical studies that does not include in its sympathies from the beginning of the course these things; the content of the literature, the facts of history, the ever-expanding light of archaeology, the inspiration of life and character, and, in the later years at least, the appreciation of style and literary forms, and the wisdom of philosophy.

Nor is this to add to the burden of our task. It is not necessary for the secondary-school teacher, much less the boy, to be an encyclopedia of information on all these interests. But it will result that if the scholars of the universities, who are later to be the teachers of the schools, care for these things, their pupils will care for them, and will work with alertness and enthusiasm to come closer to them.

Why has there been so little alertness and enthusiasm? believe the answer is still to be found in the almost universal criticism by pupils of the proportion of grammar and composition required. Just here a very clear distinction needs to be made. No one has any right to object, and I believe no one would, object, to the amount of grammar necessary to read the language. But the boy in his early ‘teens is called on to study what is known (or is thought to be known) on a scientific aspect of grammar by one of the most distinguished specialists in the field. Furthermore, isn't it true that a considerable amount of the grammar is not a final statement?

How fundamental a change from the mechanical and descriptive grammar, anxious merely to get each fact into its pigeonhole, to the grammar based on the comparative psychology of language! And even within the range of the grammar of classification, what falseness there can be! Think of Professor Hale's quoted example of "moribus suis" classified variously by three leading grammars and proved by a schoolgirl to belong under a fourth heading! And when you come to first-year books, with detached sentences, this artificial classification-work is atrocious. In any number of those sentences without context there is no real evidence to base a decision. The pupil is started on a wholly unscholarly habit of finding an answer "because that lesson's about Agent." The grammar work is ordinarily held up as the only medium for exact scholarship, when in reality it often proves a facilis descensus to slovenliness and woodenness. In all that I have said I have not the slightest desire to reflect on the value of scientific grammar as a department of classical study ,-- no one who studied under Professor Lane could do that-- but his grammar never became an octopus to crush the life out of Plautus or Lucretius or Juvenal.

To arrest any such extinction of life, to banish this effect of the remoteness of the classics is, to my mind, our first practical work in this Association. I am impressed by the effective assistance rendered the teachers of English and History by committees of their Associations, and I believe that without any result of dictation or stereotyping we could establish a sort of clearing-house committee of our ideas and methods which could effect real time-saving. In illustration, let me touch on the two fundamentals of grammar--forms and syntax. The desideratum with forms is not to memorize them, but to recognize them, and this can be brought about by tremendous changes in the present traditional arrangement, such, for instance, as grouping all subjunctives together and teaching them by tense-stems. Secondly, as to syntax-- large fields can be left out: EITHER because it is a part of all human language and never would cause any trouble if analysis were not demanded (boys assimilate many a good dinner before they can name a11 the parts of their digestive apparatus); OR becanse it is so rare that it will not occur in the boy's reading till his late college course, by which time, under the present system, he has dropped the classics.

This will result in real time-saving, and this alone is what we can hope for at present. More time will not be granted us by school systems, but more time can be gained by our united wits, and this time can be used for all those things that wi11 make Greece and Rome a reality to our pupils. Among these things I think at once of (1) more oral reading, (2) studies on the character and plot of the works read, (3) history and archaeology, (4) above all, the reading of far greater amounts, often by selections, so that something of the variety and extent of the two great literatures will become evident even to secondary school boys, and they will no longer go to their graves convinced that there were two Greek authors and three Latin authors.

We have in all our hopes, it seems to me, more incentive than the mere desire to be prosperous in our business, or even the ambition to do work of a high standard -- we have in our trust a great treasure, and one needed by this land and this time. No feature of our day is more marked than the lack of standards of criticism. Most people are at the mercy of the last new thing. They don't know how to tell a good book, a good picture, they do not know what the fine and permanent satisfactions of life are. They are a11 at sea, because they have passed through the silent revolution of our time in all fields of life from external, imposed authority to internal impulse and voluntary association. In this new self-reliance men will, as Emerson says, "grope eagerly for stays and foundations” -- and they will find them in those first great expressions of principles by Greece and Rome. These are in our charge. Let us see to it that we are worthy interpreters, remen1bering that a teacher of literature, just as a teacher of science, is at his highest "when he most skilfl1lly stands aside and lets the soul of his subject speak to the soul of his student.”