Summer with Homer and Vergil

By Kenneth M. Pierce

High school teachers get a chance to study the "real stuff'

To win a pay boost or a promotion, secondary school teachers frequently return to college during the summer, often earning credit for taking such soft subjects as "Decision Making and Leadership Development." William Bennett, chairman of the federally financed National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), had a better idea about the instructors' true wishes. Instead of educational methodology or the latest curriculum fads, he argued, "what teachers want to study is the real stuff, the right stuff." So NEH decided to fund 15 seminars this summer for high school faculty members. The program offered no formal academic credits but did pay teachers up to $2,125 for six weeks while they went back to college for the luxury of studying a great book or two, and all the right stuff: Plato, Thucydides, Homer, Vergil, Chaucer, Alexis de Tocqueville, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann.

Bennett's proposal hit a gusher. More than 2,300 teachers from 41 states applied for 225 places in the program. Since nine teachers were rejected for every one accepted, the competition was about as stiff as winning a place in the freshman class at Harvard or Brown. The university professors who taught the seminars made the final selections. "We had about 40 applicants who were on the same level academically as the 15 we picked," says Karl Galinsky, chairman of the classics department at the University of Texas in Austin; he sought the aid of a local high school teacher in reviewing applications for his course on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil's Aeneid.

In a spacious and sunny room in Waggener Hall, Galinsky last week joined his class of teachers, who clustered informally around a conference table. There was a communal feeling in the group during the friendly discussion. Galinsky wondered if his class saw any change from Homer to Vergil in the ancient poets' view of man in society. Said Barbara Kane, a classical studies teacher from Spring Lake, N.J.: "In the Aeneid, there's a definite movement away from the focus on the individual per se--you have a national responsibility to the group." Said Tom Ahern, who teaches Latin in Mashpee, Mass.: "The emphasis is on the individual bowing to the needs of the state, rather than the individual heroism in Homer."

Asked Galinsky: "Would you say that what Homer is doing is more primitive, reflecting an earlier stage of society?" Answered John Amoroso, a history teacher from Boston: "I think that what Vergil is trying to do here is to domesticate some of the virtues that we find in Homer. The problem with the Homeric hero is, ultimately, that he takes individualism to an extreme. In Homer, you could never see a domesticated hero. It's a contradiction of terms. With Vergil, we're seeing the heroic within the social fabric."

Galinsky gave his pupils high marks after the 2 1/2-hour session. Said he: "I'm constantly amazed by their motivation and the amount of initiative displayed in class every day. I've never had such an enterprising group." Galinsky assigns between 250 and 400 pages of weekly reading, which includes critical commentaries on the epics, and some of his students study in the university library until 1 in the morning. They also visited a gallery on campus to examine reproductions of classical sculpture. Says Galinsky: "The thinking originally was that we would teach only the Iliad and the Odyssey. When I wanted to add the Aeneid, I was told, 'You can't really work high school teachers so hard.' I said, 'Yes, you can.' "

Galinsky's pupils seem to love their assignments. Returning from a recent outing to Laredo, Texas, his charges read the Iliad aloud to one another in the car. When Joanne Ichkoff from Skokie, Ill., turned 56 last week, the class read passages from the Aeneid--in Latin--at her birthday party. This full immersion in learning has convinced Arlene Gregory, an English teacher from Delaware, Ohio, that the seminar will improve her teaching. Says she: "It's easy to build a wall around yourself and teach students a certain way year after year. I think we'll all go home much better teachers because our excitement about the material will be communicated to the kids."

At the University of Iowa, where English Professor Miriam Gilbert is conducting a six-week course on Shakespeare's plays, the enthusiasm is equally high. Says Gilbert: "They really work tremendously hard and put a lot into it. It's easy to poke at the secondary schools, but there is a lot of commitment out there." Ron White, who teaches theater and fine arts in Wewoka, Okla., believes that Gilbert's seminar is a morale booster for high school instructors, who sense the widespread loss of respect for their profession. "In this program," he says, "high school teachers are recognized as having scholarly interests."

Outside class, the teachers in Gilbert's seminar keep a demanding schedule: along with reading and writing assignments, they attend live performances of Shakespeare's plays and view two dozen videotapes and films of the playwright's works. Says Gilbert: "I'm trying to change the way they teach Shakespeare--to move away from the historical and the literary, and to interest students in the drama."

NEH'S tab for the summer seminars is $777,000, including salaries for the professors, who average between $7,000 and $8,000 for the six weeks. Impressed by the success of this summer's effort, the Mellon Foundation has promised NEH $500,000 to help it expand the program from 15 seminars to 52 next summer; the gift is the largest by a private foundation to the NEH.

Chairman Bennett takes issue with well-wishers who have praised the seminars as being "innovative." He feels the program is in the great tradition of the liberal arts. "There is a lot of talk about back to basics," he says. "This is what back to basics ought to mean."

--By Kenneth M. Pierce.

Reported by Lianne Hart/Austin and RoxA. Laird/Iowa City

With reporting by Lianne Hart, Rox A. Laird This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.