Talk About Teaching ------------------- Classical Studies in the Search for Community by Ralph M. Rosen =============================================================== NOTE: The following is a condensed version of an article originally written for Universities and Community Schools (Fall 1994), published by Penn's Center for Community Partnerships, in which I describe my experiences in designing and teaching an undergraduate course offered through our department in Spring 1994, entitled "Community, Neighborhood and Family in Ancient Athens and Modern Philadelphia." The course will be offered again in Spring 1996. All Classicists know only too well how over the years their profession has gradually come to be perceived from outside as a bastion of antiquarianism and pedantry, completely divorced from the world around us. There are many reasons for this development, and surely classicists themselves must bear some of the responsibility, but I am still astonished whenever I am confronted with the assumption that the study of Greco-Roman antiquity is a pursuit fundamentally "irrelevant" to today's concerns and cultural practices. I keep remembering what drew me into the profession in the first place: learning, for example, about the oral poetics of Homer at the same time as I was discovering analogous poetics in jazz and blues, for example, or following my first presidential campaign as a voting adult while studying the democratic machinery of classical Athens. In short, just about everything I encountered within classical studies was enthralling precisely because it was profoundly implicated in some way with the contemporary world and my own life within it. My testimonials, however, were hardly ever successful at mollifying my students' parents, who worried about what their child's interest in classical antiquity might lead to (or, more typically, not lead to). Time after time I found myself reciting the familiar line about the classics as the fountainhead of so many aspects of western culture, suggesting even that a person well versed in Greco-Roman antiquity might be better equipped than others to confront a complex modern world. Some parents were consoled by this line of thought, but others wanted to know more specifically how classics could serve an accountable function in the education of their sons and daughters. I slowly realized that no amount of rhetoric from me, no matter how passionate, could easily overcome popular perceptions about what a typical classics curriculum has to offer. So when Lee Benson in Penn's Center for Community Partnerships asked me whether I could conceive of a classics course that would become part of their curriculum of academically-based community service, I thought that this might be the opportunity I had been waiting for-a chance to communicate to students just how false and pernicious the polarization between the "intellectual" and the "practical" can be, especially in disciplines such as classics. Demythologizing Athens I chose the subject and title of my course, "Community, Neighborhood and Family in Ancient Athens and Modern Philadelphia," partly because my own scholarly work tends to focus on fifth-century BC Athens but more importantly because that period in particular has been so often mythologized in modern times. Part of what I wanted to do in this course was to move beyond the modern myths about Athens, examine closely how an Athenian polis was organized, how Athenian citizens fostered a sense of community at both the local and international level, and how they framed their questions about the goals of a society and the nature of happiness. My aim was not to dwell on whether the Greeks of that time were "good" or "bad" people by our own ethical standards, but to show that, by studying how an ancient culture quite different from our own wrestled with crucial issues of social organization and interpersonal behavior, we might learn something from them about our own formulation of and answers to similar questions. The seminar became affiliated with the West Philadelphia Improvement Corps (WEPIC), which established contact between my students and a fifth-grade classroom at the Anderson Elementary School. My students met in pairs with small groups of these fifth-graders for tutoring once a week in a variety of special areas. I hoped that by establishing a relationship with these elementary school students, my students would be able to relate their tutoring experiences to the main themes we were addressing in the seminar. For example, when we studied gender roles in classical Greece, I encouraged my students to question their tutees informally about such matters (as well as to share with them their own experiences), in the hope that they would thereby come to see that contemporary discourse about gender and society is part of a conversation that has been evolving for millennia. Classical Athens is practically tailor-made for a course concerned with social organization, the relationship between public and private realms of life, and the diverse, often conflicting, ideologies that control a complex society. Within a mere century, from the end of the sixth to the end of the fifth centuries BC, Athens developed from a city ruled by autocratic, if sometimes benevolent and impressive, "tyrants" to one that prided itself aggressively on its full-blown, participatory democracy. Along the way, we encounter the same sort of controversies that arise when one tries to analyze political categories and movements of any kind. Was Cleisthenes, that legendary social reformer at the end of the sixth century, really the great "democratic" patriarch he was made out to be by the Athenians of the later fifth century, or was he really an "aristocrat" with his own agenda? How much power did the "people" actually have in Athens by the end of the fifth century? Did a powerful few in fact control Athenian politics? Is a radical democracy a desirable political ideal in the first place, for Athens or anywhere? Cleon v. Frank Rizzo The jump from Athens to modern Philadelphia proved to be more effort-less and profound than I would ever have imagined. When we dipped into the recent history of Philadelphia, trying to see where its current system of government and neighborhood characteristics came from, we saw, along with obvious differences in details, some amazingly analogous trends. The general development in classical Athens, for example, from an early democracy controlled essentially by a tightly-knit aristocratic elite to a system that attempted, at least, to be more inclusive of the larger citizen population seems remarkably parallel to the shift in twentieth-century Philadelphia from a government controlled by an elitist Republican machine to one firmly controlled by Democrats. Indeed, the reaction of both societies to their own aristocratic tendencies even produced two leaders described in their respective times with strikingly similar rhetoric: at Athens in the 420s the "dem-agogue" Cleon dominated the political scene, a man said by the largely con- servative commentators of the time to be violent, boorish and vulgar, yet brilliant and effective as a general and champion of the demos; in recent Philadelphia history, Frank Rizzo cut a similar figure, both in his public persona and his ability to manipulate public sentiment. Perhaps the most fruitful avenue of comparison between Athenian and Philadelphian conceptions of "community" emerged from our examination of the elaborate organization of the Athenian polis into demes and tribes that prevailed in the fifth century. This self- conscious social experiment was the brainchild of Cleisthenes, who, after the defeat of the tyrants in 510, re-structured the social and geographical groupings of Attica in an effort to foster cultural and political coherence within a democratic system of government. By contemplating simultaneously Cleisthenic reforms and the recent history of neighborhood development in Philadelphia, the students found themselves asking themselves what "community" really means in the first place, what the real, and often subtle, differences are between community, "tribalism" and "clannishness," and how our own society (locally and nationally) might benefit from sorting out such differences for itself. Although I had a number of related objectives in offering this course, ultimately I was concerned to see whether I could make students feel that the study of antiquity is as relevant to our contemporary world as I have always felt it to be. In the end, the best way to evaluate its success is to ask whether the students came out of the course with the sense that their study of classical Athens actually illuminated their understanding of the world in which they are now living, whether studying an ancient culture actually informed their ability to formulate the questions, problems, and hopefully, some solutions confronting their own society. The final papers that they wrote for me, each in its own way, uniformly demonstrated that they did. All of the seven students in the seminar chose topics that focused as much on contemporary society in Philadelphia as on Athenian society. In all cases it was clear to me that the students had discovered that the study of a distant and different culture can indeed enhance our understanding of ourselves, our community, and our interaction with one another as private and public citizens. This article is the eighth in a series developed by the Lindback Society and the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Ralph Rosen is associate professor and chair of Classical Studies.
Almanac
Volume 41, Number 31
May 2, 1995
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