Thus sings Tevye the milkman in The Fiddler on the Roof, the 1964 musical based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories of a Jewish family in Tsarist Russia. But what is ‘‘tradition’’? For the men, it means the duty of supporting a family, and in return the right to ‘‘have the final say at home’’; for the women, the duty of keeping ‘‘a proper home,.. .a kosher home’’ and to ‘‘run the home, so Papa’s free to read the holy books.’’ The asymmetric gender division is familiar, but what may be less obvious is the assertion of fixity: this is the way (Jewish) things have been and will be. Yet as the leader of another religious communion has recently reminded us, ‘‘When people set out to prove that nothing has changed, you can normally be sure that something quite serious has’’ (Williams 2005: 4). Traditio is a handing on, and this is always a two-way process, since we cannot assume that learning or reception is passive, though teaching or transmission can hardly not be active (Whitfield 1971; Stray 2001: 207-11). Yet handing on can be, and often is, a highly routine, even ritualized activity, in which neither teacher/transmitter nor learner/receiver questions, or even thinks about, the process in which both are involved. To learn Latin, in many countries and periods, has been, at least for some social groups, simply the ordinary thing to do. Parents have not, under these circumstances, wondered whether this was right, or better or worse than alternatives. Alternatives simply did not occur to them.
This was often the situation within what Waquet calls the ‘‘empire’’ of Latin, by which she means that the language operated as a pervasive symbol of intellectual and social power (Waquet 2001). This imperial situation was gradually eroded in Europe
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as challenges were mounted by the growth of new scientific knowledge and by the emergence of vernacular literatures in the nation-states that flourished especially in the nineteenth century (Gellner 1983). The universal accessibility of Latin, within delimited social circles, had made it superior to the local languages and dialects of nations and regions. Romantic nationalism, however, valorized the vernaculars, and commitment to the individual rather than the universal became a virtue rather than a vice.1 The slow but inexorable decline of Latin as a language of scholarly communication was mirrored in the statistics of book production, where vernacular publishing can be seen to have equaled and then outstripped Latin publishing in the course of the eighteenth century (Martin 1996: 25-7).
In the following century, Latin, having lost an empire, retained a kingdom (Waquet 2001): it still possessed a powerful social cachet, but was no longer the default means of scholarly or scientific communication. A significant process of the transition from ‘‘imperial’’ to ‘‘royal’’ status was the ideology of mental discipline, renamed by twentieth-century psychologists the transfer of training (Kolesnik 1962). This presented Latin as a subject of study superior to all others, in that mastering it would facilitate the mastery of other subjects. Psychologists and teachers alike had ideological axes to grind, and the debate on transfer of training was never likely to be settled through rational discussion. In 1934, a scientifically trained British headmaster was quoted in a Latin textbook as follows: ‘‘If I were in a runaway motorcar, and the driver had to dodge a dog, put his foot on the right one of three pedals and show presence of mind in handling the steering wheel, the prayer I should put up would be: I hope this fellow has learnt Latin’’ (Lyne 1934: 10-11). The same witness is quoted as explaining that
The study of the classics. . . deals with an expression of human experience which is once for all finished and unchangeable. All rules are definite, and all exceptions established in the known literature. The result is that the mind acquires both a precision and flexibility which the study of no language or science which is still in the course of development can give. (Lyne 1934: 10)
Two aspects of this defense of classics are noteworthy. First, the conception of classics as something complete and finished. The ancient world is dead: all that is left is to learn its lessons. The contrast posited here is that referred to by the nineteenth-century polymath William Whewell as that between ‘‘permanent’’ and ‘‘progressive’’ knowledge. The former included geometry, Latin, and Greek; the latter, chemistry, geology, and philology (Whewell 1838: 5-10). Whewell’s point was that knowledge that changes is unsuitable as a basis for education: stability and certainty were needed in the education of youth. The second aspect to notice is that, as the reference to ‘‘rules’’ and ‘‘exceptions’’ makes clear, the writer is concerned not with ‘‘classics’’ but only with language - and, as his peroration shows, with Latin. The ‘‘presence of mind’’ he admires, the crucial link between a history of learning and its deployment in a challenging situation, is the presence of a mind that acquires certainty from grammatical rules and flexibility from ‘‘established exceptions.’’
This neatly formulated combination of discipline and flexibility aptly summarizes the requirements classics must meet if it is to operate as an adequate resource in making sense of human life. It needs to possess permanent and universal value so as to be proof against the corroding effects of change (the emergence of new social and cultural formations) and relativity (e. g., the challenge of other sources of meaning - natural science, vernacular languages). Yet it must be flexible enough to adapt to new circumstances and to a wide variety of cases. The conception of classics as centered on literature, and that in turn as centered on language, seen largely in grammatical terms, is curiously limited, but in some historical periods it has been very widespread. Its attraction has surely lain in the notion of rules, not exceptions: in the terms used by the source quoted above, in ‘‘precision,’’ not ‘‘flexibility.’’ If, however, we look beyond the kingdom of Latin, we find another area of classics that has often been seen as providing the flexibility Latin lacks: Greek. Latin’s older sister glories in its flexibility, its more relaxed grammatical and syntactic structure undercutting to some extent the Latinate opposition of rule and exceptions. With two languages in play, we are presented with a bipolar conception of classics. These twin poles have generally been seen as sources of culture (Greek) and discipline (Latin), and defenses of classics and its teaching vary according as they privilege the one or the other (Stray 1998: 8-11).
There are other ways of conceiving of classics, however, that bring with them yet more patterns of inclusion and exclusion. The contrasts discussed above center on language, and the teaching and learning of language has constituted a central thread in the classical tradition. Yet the ancients did more than speak and write in Latin and Greek: they built, traded, fought, and prayed, walked, and sailed. The tendency, dominant in the nineteenth century and persistent even in the twentieth, to refer to ‘‘the classics’’ as a subject of study conflated the study of the ancient world with the study of its literature. ‘‘The classics’’ were the ancient authors. The disappearance of the definite article has weakened this link: that it still survives, however, can be seen by the use of the phrase ‘‘classics and ancient history’’ in the titles of some university departments. (‘‘The Classics’’ is now rarely found, though examples survive at Harvard University and the University of Illinois.)2
The history of the teaching and learning of classics can to some extent be told in terms of the contrasts and issues mentioned above. In classical Greece, the shared consciousness of Greekness was underpinned by the learning of the Homeric poems, despite internal political and ethnic divisions (e. g., Dorian vs. Ionian). Homer was the first European ‘‘classic,’’ but later writers also became canonized by the scholars of Alexandria as they compared texts and annotated manuscripts. The conquests of Alexander led to the formalization of grammatical rules in the teaching of Greek to non-Greek speakers, following the analyses of the fifth-century sophists. Recent work based on papyri has extended our knowledge in this area, but the evidence is patchy and the specialists disagree on its interpretation (Morgan 1998; Cribiore 2005). It was not long before the non-Greeks learning the language included conquerors rather than conquered, and the Romans learned Greek while often despising its native speakers. The captured Greeks who taught grammar in Rome began a long tradition of such teaching, though the social status of grammatici later rose. Both grammar and rhetoric became central to the education of high-status Roman boys, and this continuing social imperative led to a fossilization of the pedagogic tradition under the empire (Kaster 1988; Atherton 1998).
The later career of grammar is complicated, and this is no place to trace its history through the speculative theories of the Middle Ages and the new learning of the Renaissance (Law 2003) to the flowering of comparative philology in the nineteenth century (Davies 1998). What does need to be stressed is the link between the formal structure of grammar and the discipline imposed by teachers on pupils. (As the word disciplina itself suggests, the pedagogic scene is the prime example of discipline: learning goes with orderliness.) An important aspect of the mental discipline /transfer of training tradition of justifying classics was the centrality of formal grammar. From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, we can see that this tradition, usually maintained as a set of unexamined assumptions, gave way in the 1960s to an antigrammar (and antidiscipline) tradition that is still similarly maintained (Mulroy 2003). The lower depths of a grammar-based teaching tradition in which continuing links between classics and social status meant the subject was both embedded and in effect uncriticizable can be glimpsed in Geoffrey Willans’s stories of Nigel Molesworth (Willans and Searle 1958). Here the text and the powerfully sardonic drawings of Ronald Searle show a world where pupils do not expect Latin to make sense and teachers are often not competent to explain it: as a result, the pupils make their own, subversive sense both of what they are supposed to learn and of their own situation (Stray 1994).
The world of Molesworth is one where classics is compulsory; the corollaries are not only that many pupils cannot cope, but that the supply of adequate teachers is insufficient. The paradigms of the grammar book symbolize and underpin a pedagogical relationship of hierarchical rule, but they also encapsulate formal rules that enable pupils to discover gaps in the teacher’s knowledge. Avoidance, ambiguity, and subversion characterize both ends of the classroom. The fierce reaction against this embedded world of rote learning in the 1960s led initially to Latin courses that avoided formal grammatical labels, as in the Cambridge Schools Latin Course (Forrest 1996). In many schools, the new course presented difficulties for teachers who had been brought up to believe that classics was Latin, Latin was grammar, and grammar symbolized discipline (Stray 1998: 293-7).
This brings us back to the question ofchange, an inescapable and constant element of tradition, however large the image of tradition as total fixity may loom in culture and curriculum wars (Carnochan 1993). As the above example suggests, unless change in schooling is carefully managed, it can lead to confusion and, for some individuals, tragedy. The history of classical education in Europe includes long periods in which relatively stable systems of teaching and learning were established and maintained. From the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, the persistence of Latin as a spoken language played an important part in this. Schools either encouraged or forced pupils to converse in Latin, and this interacted with a curriculum that was dominated by Latin grammar and then literature to embed the pupil in a Latinate world of experience. He (it was mostly he) did not so much study a distant world as inhabit a modern version of it, and the mastery of the language was part of a kind of puberty rite (Ong 1959). Those boys who went on to university continued to use
Latin in oral disputations with teachers and other students, the characteristic mode of testing that was still vigorous in the eighteenth century, though in Cambridge particularly it was increasingly subordinated to written examinations (Chang 2004; Stray 2005). This world of familiar Latinity is reflected in the Orbis sensualium pictus (The world of experience in pictures) of Jan Comenius, an illustrated dictionary of everyday experience in Latin and German that has some claim to be the first book written for children (Comenius 1658). It begins with the teacher-pupil relationship, its first page depicting these two figures, Magister and Puer. At the end of the nineteenth century, W. H. D. Rouse, despairing of the by-then traditional rote learning of grammar in British schools, attempted to return to the world of oral Latin (and Greek) by advocating the use of a direct method of teaching. In his school, classics was taught through conversation in Latin and Greek, but the wider movement eventually failed, largely because the method demanded so much of the teacher - a mastery both of classical vocabulary and of the skills to deploy it in the classroom (Stray 1992). A similar movement in the US was led by Gonzalez Lodge of Columbia University.
Many attempts at the reform of classical teaching have failed because of the massive inertia built into systems of schooling. This is particularly the case when teachers are not professionally trained to teach, and especially when they spend their careers in a single institution. The extreme case in Britain can be seen in Eton College, the leading public (independent) school. In the nineteenth century its scholars went to King’s College, Cambridge, a linked foundation, and often returned to Eton to teach. This was a closed system in which traditions of teaching were perpetuated: the Latin and Greek grammars used had been written for Eton, and change or substitution was seen as disloyal. The more general phenomenon is reflected in the comment of the lexicographer and textbook writer William Smith to his publisher John Murray in 1850: ‘‘I need not tell you of the difficulty of getting new grammars introduced into schools’’ (Smith 1850). The history of classical teaching is littered with examples of inspired teachers who undermined contemporary assumptions but had little influence outside their own classrooms. A few spread the word through publishing: an example is D’Arcy Thompson Sr. (1829-1902: Irwin 2004), whose Day Dreams of a Schoolmaster (Thompson 1864) recorded his attempts to teach classics in Edinburgh without rote learning or corporal punishment. His book was much reprinted as an inspirational guide to teachers, but significantly, without the chapters on the details of classics teaching. A good example of a successful attempt at change is the success of Mason Gray’s Latin for Today, a course developed in the US in the 1920s which, very unusually, crossed the Atlantic to become a market leader in Britain in the following decade (Stray 1998: 278). This course attempted to provide a systematic alternative to the standard grammar/translation approach, basing itself instead on the cultivation of reading skills, grammar being learned en passant. Latin for Today was adapted for the British market in the 1930s by an experienced teacher, Cuthbert McEvoy. The rarity of such cross-national transfers is striking: the Latin grammars of Benjamin Kennedy (1804-89), dominant in Britain by the 1870s, never gained US editions because of differences of terminology (e. g., Kennedy used the ‘‘new’’ order of cases inspired by comparative philology: nom-voc-acc-gen-dat-abl [Allen and Brink 1980; Stray 1996]).
World History
