The Old Days of Glory? in the wee hours
Like many my age and older, I often look at the kids in high school and think,”back in my day, we worked harder and had to know more.” The truth of this statement is highly contestable, and I might even be wrong. Those much older than myself, including one professor, have expressed this same thought with regard to me. Back in their day, it was oh so much more difficult to master the material. This is the intellectual equivalent of telling the kids you had to walk to school in the snow, uphill, both ways. I have found this idea echoed in recent papers on the history of Classical scholarship. Kitchell, Phinney, Shelmerdine, and Skinner provide a thoughtful analysis of the slow death and hopeful revival of Greek in an article in CJ 91.4 (April 1996) titled “Greek 2000.” They are guilty of the disdainful nostalgia. Perhaps the most amusing passage reads:
“Laments were raised about how inferior today’s students seemed to have become. Electronic reminiscences flew transcontinentally [sic], trumpeting the amount of Greek we of the old guard had done in our classes, the difficulty of our curricula, and the bracing rigor of the old texts. All of this nostalgic and regretful electronic chatter evoked strange pictures of aged Nestor, bent over his terminal, typing ‘Once did I conquer a complete synopsis of horao, not a synopsis such as men do today, but one which it would take three men of this age to do.’”
True or false?
Kristin Jun 28
I have not really given this matter the rumination it deserves, but I do think that such comparisons are fundamentally flawed. Education can not be so handily compared from generation to generation. School is, at its most basic, a place that hopefully gives us the tools we need to succeed, both externally (at work, as part of a country, among peers, with family) and internally (our ability to find joy, wealth and knowledge ourselves once school days are done, and to share that joy, wealth and knowledge with others). As such, we can hardly say that, say, my education is superior to my daughter’s because I learned about WWII while she studied Vietnam, because I had more history and she has more civics, that I learned French and she Mandarin, or, I believe, that I memorized mathematical formulae while she learned to program computers to solve them for her (a process which still requires an understanding of the formulae in question). How could I possibly be sad that she cannot work a typewriter when she can create whole presentations via Powerpoint and Movie Maker? She is not learning less, but instead is learning what she will need to fit into her world. And, while I do understand that her school is different from many, so was there a range of academic fitness when I was in school. I agree with you, Richard, in that I see a lot of disdain in such comparisons, brought on, I believe, either by the position of those making the juxtapositions (the over-educated - and therefore self-proclaimedly opinion-entitled - make these comparisons about the under- rather than the other way around), or the commenter’s fear of the change in the world that threatens to leave them behind and the youth that both represents and embraces it, or the all-too-human tendency to forget the bad and remember the good in order to stay sane.
I am babbling, and probably make no sense. I will talk to you soon. Good night, sir! A smooch to the girls from me!
richard Jun 29
I agree with the difficulty in comparing education from one generation to the next. Your daughter is learning about Vietnam when you learned about WWII, though I must say that Vietnam for you in school was still a century away (I’m kidding! How old are you again?!) As for the Mandarin/French, typewriter/powerpoint example, these truly are differences. My question, however, does not seek to compare differences in what subjects students are mastering or what technologies they are using to master or present them, as much as it seeks to inquire whether or not they are as knowledgeable. My initial response would be to say that, whereas we had plenty of depth, we did not have much breadth. At least, I didn’t in my crappy high school. The modern student has the inverse. This scores one for the modern student, considering that the true purpose, at least of humanistic education, is to develop the complete intellect. I must agree with your eloquent sentiments about the purpose of school, though I will add that not only must students be given the tools to succeed in the modern world, they must be given the tools to change the world. We have done so much harm to our planet, to each other, to the fabric of our humanity, that it will take revolutionary thinkers to mend these things. Again, the modern student has the edge here, for a hallmark of education is the enactment of social progressivism, and this generation does it!
Back to the quotation I used in my post. Ancient Greek is, gasp, dead. The subject matter has not changed (though the textual and interpretive scholarship move at lightning speed) in quite some time. One must still learn the alphabet and so forth. Are these teachers (including one of my former profs) correct when complaining about a drop in quality within the studentry? Here is a perfect test case with a self-contained body of knowledge and methodology. Well, not exactly. See, the first response is that the modern Hellenist is not as knowledgeable as his/her predecessor. I cannot compose dactylic hexameters as I translate Shakespeare into ancient Greek (cf. Cambridge tripos exam 1897), but I know some old salts who could. I must defend myself, however, and say that I too once conquered a complete synopsis of horao. I must also say that this is not an idle question tumbling in my vacant mind only. This question has become a concern in academia, especially within disciplines such as Classics, English Lit, and Art History. Modern students are not grasping their subject at the same rate or with the same thoroughness as their predecessors. Why not?
Well, many of my professors did not have to work a job, had no wife or children, went to private school from the time they were in short pants (and in the phallic days before the middle of the century, almost all of them were in short pants), and were isolated from much of he rest of the world. They did not have to continue to master rapidly changing technology in order to keep up on research, let alone present material. They did not have to know much about the rest of the world (which was, until quite recently, not very important within the humanities). More time to study one thing usually produces different results, even in the same course.
Finally, and I apologize for my rant as I realize I am preaching to the choir on this one, before the 1950s most people did not go to college. They were screened out and, if found wanting, were excluded quite early from such subjects as was thought to befit a “proper” young man (again, almost always). Kids who might have enjoyed and even excelled instead were shepherded into a ‘respectable’ blue-collar life. So, the same sort of crop came up to freshman Greek every year, entitled, rich, unconcerned with the plight of others, and arrogant. They spent their lives mastering the language. But, they were not as smart as many modern students, and I dare say that they did not know the Greeks as well as they knew the language of the Greeks. Here, the modern student knows more about every aspect of ancient Greek life. And that is knowledge, at least in my book, more worth knowing.
JustKristin Jun 30
The choir says “Amen”.
P.S.
“An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.”
- Aldous Huxley