In the last ten years great changes have taken place in the course of study required of boys in preparation for Harvard College. The present list of requirements was published in the College Catalogue for 1886-87, after much discussion in the college and outside of it. The main point of dispute was the compulsory study of Greek. The opponents of Greek attacked it as being of no practical value to any person who was not to become either a student of language or a teacher, and argued, from this point of view, that it was absurd to require all boys to study it. Many other persons, trained under the old system, could not conceive of a liberally educated man to whom Greek was but a name, and therefore defended the requirement. The college authorities have settled the question for a time by admitting pupils with no knowledge of Greek, but only under very stringent conditions.
[...] Let us examine these studies in detail, and notice what changes have been made in the methods of examination in them, in order to see and understand the new methods of instruction which are required to meet the new tests. In the elementary examination in the classics, the test applied is the translation at sight of passages from Caesar and Nepos in Latin, and from Xenophon in Greek. These authors all have a simple narrative style, and their thought is neither involved nor profound, so that their works are entirely within the comprehension of the average boy. Such a test as this requires an entire change from traditional methods of classical teaching, but unfortunately many persons do not understand just what this change is.
Formerly the candidate was asked to show that he had read certain specified works by translating passages from them, and to show his knowledge of some standard Latin or Greek grammar by explaining the grammatical construction of certain words in these passages. To be able to do this the pupil stored in his memory a translation of passages from the books he had himself read or had heard some one else read. Unless he had a natural fondness for language, he read these passages as combinations of words, for each of which he had to have some English equivalent word, but rarely realized, or cared to realize, the thought which was meant to be conveyed by them. He was taught to pick out his Latin or Greek words by means of their English equivalents in an English order; that is, first the subject, then the verb, and last the object, each with its modifiers. He then studied these English words in the English order to make something out of them which, according to his English notions, made sense. His thoughts and conceptions were only his own English ones. He was made to learn all the rules of syntax before he did any reading, because he must explain each construction he met by making it fit under one of these rules. This whole system of teaching looked at the classics only from an English point of view. The student gained very little more than a confused knowledge of the arbitrary names which grammarians have given to Latin and Greek constructions, and some insight into ancient life and customs, which would have been clearer and would have been obtained more easily if he had read any good translation of his author. He did not learn to read the languages, nor realize that thoughts were expressed by them.
Now the college requires him to be so familiar with the vocabulary and forms of thought of the classics that he can read a passage he has never seen before, in which the style is not different from that to which he is accustomed, and the thought not more profound than it is in the books which he has read. In order to do this at all, the pupil must read each sentence as he reads an English or French one; that is, he must take in the ideas in the order in which they are presented in the Latin or Greek sentence. He must learn how a Roman or a Greek thought, to be able to grasp the new thoughts which may be presented to him in a new passage. He must get at the ideas expressed by his author before he attempts to translate; that is, before he puts these ideas into good English.
The new system of teaching, if it would meet the new test, must keep these two processes--the understanding of the Latin or Greek thought, and the expression of it in English translation--entirely distinct, because the student can arrive at the ideas in a passage he has never seen only through the language in which they are found; whereas, under the old system, the two were confused, and the tendency of the teaching, as we have seen, was to make him translate before he had a clear understanding of the thought. The student must look at the different constructions of the language as ways of conveying thoughts, and be asked to explain the thought which is contained in them rather than to give some arbitrary rules of syntax for them which he often does not understand. In order to read the thought, he must be familiar with the syntax; but he gets this familiarity by reading, as the physicist, by observing phenomena in his laboratory, arrives at the knowledge of nature's laws. This new method of teaching gives, as it were, a laboratory training in language. The aim is now, not to read a certain quantity of Latin an Greek, but to learn how to read these languages, and to make the student realize that, although the languages are dead, they were and are still vehicles of thought.
Reading with this aim is what the phrase "reading at sight" really means. In many schools this is too little understood. It is supposed to mean guessing at words to save the use of a dictionary, while in reality the dictionary has to be used much more thoughtfully than before, as the boy must learn what each word meant to a Roman or a Greek and not simply find some English word for it which will fit into his preconceived notion of what the sentence means. Pupils are too frequently allowed to pass over forms in a slipshod way without learning them. Experience with pupils in preparation for college has shown me that an exact knowledge of the forms is absolutely essential in order to see at a glance the relations between words, and so to grasp the thought which is expressed by them. Such exact knowledge of the forms can be got only by memorizing them.
This method of studying the classics brings out clearly their educational value. The conceptions of Latin and Greek and the forms of expression are so different from the student's own that he must analyze words, phrases, and sentences containing complex ideas to arrive at any real comprehension of the author's meaning. Being thus obliged to look at each thought from two points of view, the Latin or Greek and the English, he is forced to get a clearer conception of the thought than he could possibly get by looking at it from the English side only. As few words in two widely different languages have exactly corresponding conceptions behind them,--that is, are synonyms,--he must get at these conceptions to see what a sentence really means. He must think, and think clearly. He grows accustomed to clear thinking, and therefore expresses his own thoughts more clearly both in speech and in writing. From this kind of classical training, as from mathematics, he learns to reason logically, but with this fundamental difference: in mathematics he reasons from letters and figures representing quantity, and from this limitation in the symbols he receives broad conceptions.
Something of this mental training was got under the old system of classical teaching, but the college examination did not then test this power of thinking as the present one does. A pupil cannot translate a passage he has never seen before without this power. To read at sight, a student must have a large vocabulary of Latin or Greek words, of which each word represents to him not one English equivalent word, but an idea. Under the old system of examination this vocabulary was not necessary, because he had read the passages before, and could often remember the context without knowing the meaning of separate words. This vocabulary will always be a valuable possession to him, when we consider that a large part of our English vocabulary is derived from Latin and Greek, so that a perfectly intelligent use of English words is impossible without some knowledge of these languages. This system of teaching the classics is for these reasons practical, and this study of them is as valuable to the business man as to the college professor.
The desire to banish all studies which are not to be of immediate money value to the student, which has given rise to the discussion of the comparative usefulness of ancient and modern languages, has caused many persons to overlook the true value of a right study of Latin and Greek. The study of them is valuable to every man for the mental training which they give much more than for the knowledge of ancient life and literature which is obtained through them. This knowledge can be and often is obtained by reading English translations of the classics, and modern works on ancient art, life, and literature; but this training can be got only by the study of the languages themselves. The man who says his Greek or Latin is of no use to him in business or elsewhere does not realize that if he really studied either language his powers of thinking were increased, even though he has forgotten every fact learned about the language itself.
James Jay Greenough, The Atlantic Monthly; May, 1892
Volume 69, No. 415; pages 671-677. artigo completo aqui.
imagem: estátua de John Harvard, em Harvard Square.
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