To Construe or To Collaborate

When is it right to remove the training wheels from the bicycle and let a child ride freely?  What is the appropriate stage for students to stop working with paradigms and established formats and begin to create?  Parents and teachers alike wrestle with such questions, and most adults working with children tend to cling too long to the one or to rush the other, yet both are needed in anyone's development in any endeavor.

Guiding a Child's Gait

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1553-1592

I have often quoted from one of my favorite works, Montaigne's essay "On Education," in which he wrote, "[I]t is the achievement of a lofty and very strong soul to know how to come down to a childish gait and guide it.  I walk more firmly and surely uphill than down," (Donald Frame translation).  Among the reasons why it is such a difficult task "to come down to a childish gait" is that teachers have moved beyond it.  We are excited about the breadth and depth and all the richness of our subjects and cannot wait to get into the good stuff with our students.  What teacher who loves writing and is an author wants to spend time on the structure of the three paragraph essay?  What Latin teacher in love with the pyrotechnic rhetoric of Cicero and the poetry of Vergil, whom Tennyson described as "wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man," wants to stay in endless verb and noun drills?

One answer to this is to forgo such elementary work entirely.  Throw students straight into the deep end of the creative pool, some would say.  Yet any coach will tell you that athletes must be taught the fundamental movements and rules of the game before it makes sense to run complex plays during practice.  Part of what teachers are called to do is to restrain their own yearning to get into the deep material before their students are ready for it.  They must learn to walk firmly and surely downhill as well as uphill and not feel that they are the less for doing so.

Beyond The Charted Boundaries

And yet, students must be exposed to the deep, rich matters of their subjects to inspire them and give them a vision of where they are going, else the elementary work becomes even more drudgery as it seems to serve no purpose.  I was reminded of this recently when I watched the 1951 film The Browning Version, starring Michael Redgrave.  The entire film is available at archive.org, and it is more than worth the time to watch, but the scene that struck me and stayed with me long after the film had ended was the following.

In this scene, Andrew Crocker-Harris (Redgrave) is giving a tutorial to one of his Greek students, a boy named Taplow, who is translating the Agammemnon of Aeschylus.

Taplow:  Oh, Clytemnestra, we're surprised at...

Crocker-Harris:  We marvel at.

Taplow:  We marvel at thy tongue.  How bold thou art that you...

Crocker-Harris:  Thou.

Taplow:  Thou can...

Crocker-Harris:  Canst.

Taplow:  Canst boastfully speak...

Crocker-Harris:  Utter such a boastful speech.

Taplow:  Utter such a boastful speech over the bloody corpse of the husband you've just slain.

Crocker-Harris:  Taplow, I presume you are using a different text from mine.

Taplow:  No, sir.

Crocker-Harris:  That is strange, for the line as I read it reads "etis toin dep andri kompazeis logon."  However diligently I search, I can discover no "bloody," no "corpse," no "you have slain."  Simply "husband."

Taplow:  Yes, sir.  That's right.

Crocker-Harris:  Then why do you invent words that simply are not there?

Taplow:  Well, I thought they sounded better, sir.  More exciting.  After all, she did kill her husband.  She's just been revealed with his dead body weltering in gore.

Crocker-Harris:  I am delighted at this evidence, Taplow, in your interest in the rather more lurid aspects of dramaturgy, but I feel I must remind you that you are supposed to be construing Greek, not collaborating with Aeschylus.

Taplow:  Yes, but still, sir, translator's license, sir.  I didn't get anything wrong, and after all, it is a play, and not just a bit of Greek construe.

There it is.  To construe or to collaborate, that is the question:  whether 'tis nobler for teachers and students to suffer the necessary work of learning a craft or to take what has been learned to create.  Just as there are those who would move too fast to the more exciting projects of creation, so there are teachers who would linger too long in the stage of construal.  I addressed this at the end of an article I wrote years ago about a disputed passage in the textual tradition of Vergil's Aeneid.  Renowned Classics scholar G.P. Goold, who served as the chair of Classics departments at Harvard, Yale, and University College, London, over the course of his distinguished career had made a statement with which I profoundly disagreed.

"'An elementary teacher, to reach in due season the end of his curriculum, must every hour turn a Nelson eye to serious problems and refrain from pursuing truth beyond the charted boundaries of the textbook' (Goold, 115).  I would argue that the true magister can never be so bound, but must, along with the students, pursue the truth, no matter how anfractuous the path."

In the end, teachers must know what their students need, whether that be the acquisition of facts and basic skills or the development of creativity once those have been mastered.  Both are necessary for a student's complete education, and one should not be pursued longer than necessary, nor should the other be rushed before its time.

How Classics Saved My Life

"I am a college-educated American.  In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil.  I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages.  Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare.

"The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution.  I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton.  My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment.  Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting."  The Benedict Option, p. 154, Rod Dreher

As I read these words, I was struck by the realization that there, but for the my chosen field of Classics, would have gone I.  Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil...why, of course, I thought, but then I paused.  Had I actually encountered them in any class not of my choosing?  I thought long and hard about it, and the answer was no.

In my high school senior English class we read a bit of Chaucer, and I will always be grateful for the introduction I received to Pope, Donne, and Keats from that teacher, Mr. John Richardson.  I also got from him Shakespeare's sonnets to go along with Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar, the only Shakespearean plays I would ever be required to read throughout my educational career.  Somewhere there were bits of Homer's Odyssey.  There was no significant world history class for my high school diploma.

As an undergraduate at Indiana University, I took only two English classes.  Through one, a survey, I was introduced to Dante, though only parts in the Norton Anthology that included glimpses of the Old Testament as literature.  I took only one history class, and that was in ancient history for my major in Classical Studies.

Only in classes that I chose to take as a high school Latin student or undergraduate and graduate student in Classics did I encounter any of the following:  Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Plato, and Herodotus.  I was introduced to Montaigne and Hume in an elective freshman honors seminar.  Although we read part of Augustine's Confessions in that class, I had never heard of the church fathers until I casually encountered them through friends in graduate school, and then it was not in any class.  All that I know of Aquinas has been acquired on my own.  The same goes for Anselm, Descartes, and Milton.  Alexis de Tocqueville, The Federalist Papers, and The Constitution of the United States of America...if I had not read them of my own accord, they would hold no place in my knowledge.  In fact, as I survey the significant authors on my bookshelves, I find that at best I know of a few from any required class in my schooling.  Most I learned about on my own, and almost all I have read solely outside the classroom.

My encounter with Latin in high school sparked an interest in me that led me to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in Classics, and it was through that interest and study that I have come to know most of what I know of any importance.  Friends, such things ought not to be.  The human heritage bequeathed to the world through the history, literature, and theology of the West should not be a curiosity available only for a kid who studies Latin to discover.  Should everyone become a Homeric scholar or an expert in Dante?  Of course not.  But everyone should be introduced to the true gems of human discovery and achievement.  Whether or not a person picks up one of those gems and makes it his or her own is up to that student.  This much, however, is true.  Any school or system of education apart from a program of specific skills training that does not, as Benjamin Jowett wrote in the preface to his translation of Thucydides, "present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions, its creations in politics and in art, like the distant remembrance of youth, before the delighted eyes of mankind," stands convicted of dereliction of duty and betrayal of its true mandate.