B.’s tour of her initiatives in Britain and Flanders to teach Classics, especially ancient Greek, at primary school level is a fascinating and instructive read, which in its kindness and realism gives hope to the Classics community: the approach gives ancient languages and literatures an unpretentious relevance outside elite circles and even helps to educate a decidedly non-elite audience, namely children growing up in difficult circumstances.
In the first chapter, ‘Connecting social justice and classical languages’, B. maps out how economic and educational status are connected – everywhere, but mainly in the two countries she has been working in. Poverty limits access to education, as is illustrated by personal experiences (‘I have met children who started school not knowing how to turn the pages of a book’, p. 5). Apart from the circumstances of educational accessibility, there is also the reputation of Classics as an elite sport for the upper classes, which seems hard to get rid of. This idea appears deeply rooted in beliefs – including with economically disadvantaged families, who feel that Classics may not be for them. At the same time, studies in various European countries show that disadvantaged pupils benefit from studying Classics in many ways.
However, these studies tend to focus on secondary schools, although it may be easier to introduce additional courses at primary level, as B. explores in her second chapter, ‘Raising young heroes – teaching Latin and ancient Greek at primary school’. She begins with the surprisingly rich tradition of teaching Latin and Greek in primary schools, starting in the USA in the 1970s, with the aim of giving disadvantaged children access to privileged content, focusing on the non-canonical (African authors such as Terence, Apuleius and St Augustine) and on topics such as class (slavery and minority groups). While these programmes have a clear social agenda, later European ones such as the British Minimus Latin Course or the French Nausicaa programme also aim to increase the number of students of Classics at secondary and higher levels. As B. points out, these objectives need not be mutually exclusive, but her priority is social justice, not preparing children for secondary Greek or Latin. In her programme, Ancient Greeks – Young Heroes, Flemish university students teach Greek to primary school children, most of whom have a migrant background and do not speak Dutch at home. B. first highlights the category of pupils’ enjoyment – apparently everyone really had fun. Literacy levels seem to have increased (the test groups are still too small to have a definitive result), and, perhaps most importantly, there are many cases of self-conscious students who started the course doubting their own ability to follow, but eagerly participated over time. Teaching an ‘elite’ subject like ancient Greek to underprivileged children, it seems, gives them self-confidence and shows them the pleasure that can go along with learning.
Chapter 3, ‘Six steps to transformative learning through classics at primary school’, deals with a phenomenon that B. calls ‘disorientation’, the main aim of her teaching programme: ‘to disrupt the potentially damaging self-image pupils growing up in difficult circumstances have of themselves and offer them an opportunity to transform this image into a more constructive one through the study of ancient Greek’ (p. 66). This disorientation and disruption runs the risk of triggering pupils in diverse classrooms: B.’s pupils got upset when asked to draw an ancient god against their own religious taboos, and a seemingly innocuous exercise in comparative linguistics instigated hostilities between ethnic groups. The six steps B. proposes to deal with these situations involve a lot of reflection on individual perspectives, which is both a learning tool and a goal in itself. They are by no means limited to the teaching of Classics, but can be applied to any heterogeneous classroom – although it is tempting to make the otherness of ancient Greece a central factor in the equation.
Next, B. answers ‘Six “how-to” questions on teaching Latin and ancient Greek language at primary school’. Her case study is a course called Monsters in storytelling traditions, which serves as a great example of integrating students’ backgrounds into learning: vocabulary is frequently studied in comparison with students’ home languages, potentially revealing similarities, for example between Greek and Persian. This ‘translanguaging approach’ (p. 94 et passim) opens up the potentially elitist learning system into a space where language in general is reflected upon, as is identity in all its fragility. This can indeed be called transformative, as it leads to a greater awareness of how linguistic systems work.
In general B. suggests deductive learning approaches for her target audience: the alphabet is discovered by recognising words that are similar in Flemish. Grammar, too, is taught deductively: B. suggests practising the imperative with movement by re-enacting a mythical story, or discussing adjectives while describing a mythical creature. The accusative is discovered without necessarily using any grammatical terminology, simply by inserting Greek nouns in their correct form into a Flemish sentence: ‘Κέρβερος is distracted’, but ‘I push Κέρβερον aside with a stick’. Pre-reading Greek texts aloud takes the stress out of understanding the foreign language, and new information is practised by means of a board game.
In her last chapter B. turns to ‘Community engagement between pupils and policy’. This makes for a thoroughly optimistic read, as she describes her own development from a teacher to a co-creator who has learned much from her students and their primary school pupils – again, an experience that I am sure many teachers both inside and outside of Classics share. A unique aspect of the unusual courses that B. has initiated is perhaps the feedback from students’ families and from the political sphere: Latin and Greek have been added to the Welsh primary curriculum as ‘international languages’ as a result of the programme. B. concludes with some advice in response to criticisms that many of us Classics scholars may have heard: should pupils not learn a living language, such as Chinese? Are they not overwhelmed with the intellectual challenge? Will they be disappointed if they want to continue Classics at secondary school and are then overwhelmed? B. easily dismisses the first question as whataboutism, and rightly so, I think: yes, you could do similar courses with Chinese, and that would be wonderful, but there is no reason why this possibility should stand in the way of ancient Greek courses. The second and third arguments, which are really the same, are more difficult to address: B. stresses several times over the course of the book that her courses are not designed to increase the number of students at secondary school level, but to broaden the horizon and give self-confidence to pupils that ‘are so far removed from a classics trajectory at secondary school that taking part in the course does not change their educational pathway’ (p. 110). But there is no definite answer to the question who should take Classics courses for how long – it really depends on the individual situation of a pupil and also on the local circumstances: is Classics even available at secondary school level outside elite private schools?
B.’s study has an interactive aspect to it that some might find curious: after each chapter, readers are asked to evaluate their own attitudes to the topics discussed in so-called ‘reflection tools’. It may catch some readers unawares after reading, for example, the first chapter, to be asked if they are ‘aware of the inequity and hierarchies present in the educational system in [their] country or area’ (p. 19), but it seems an extremely clever way to encourage readers to think about their own system and situation, and therefore to broaden the scope of the book beyond B.’s expertise. While this book is an encouragement to all those who wish to teach Classics at primary level – be they primary school teachers, university students, retired teachers or anyone else –, it is also a fascinating read for all audiences interested in Classics or even education in general.
