The place of Classics in the Italian education system

The Italian education system is mainly a public state system and includes three stages after pre-primary school:

1. 1 Primary school (pupils aged 6 to 10)

2. 2 Secondary education, divided between:

   2a

   1. Lower secondary (Scuola secondaria di primo grado: three years, for pupils aged 11 to 13)

   2. 2b Upper secondary (Scuola secondaria di secondo grado: five years, for pupils aged 14 to 18)

One of the school types available at the level of upper secondary education is the liceo classico, in which both Latin and Greek are taught for five years. This school type mainly has its roots in the Prussian Gymnasium, and its history would offer a long and interesting discussion (especially regarding the history of teaching Classics throughout Europe).Footnote ² However, for our purpose we only need mention that enrolments in liceo classico have been decreasing continuously in the past 30 years:Footnote ³ more and more pupils are now choosing other school types, such as technical schools and the liceo scientifico,Footnote ⁴ in which Greek is not taught and pupils also have the possibility to avoid the study of Latin.Footnote ⁵

The educational landscape is changing, and various causes are responsible.Footnote ⁶ Those who say that Greek and Latin are no longer up-to-date nor useful in an era of computers and social networks are perhaps not aware that the public debate on the so-called usefulness of Latin and ancient Greek is as old as the Italian education system itself (Montevecchi and Raicich, Reference Montevecchi and Raicich1995, pp. 181–82).

In our opinion and experience, an extensive reform of Italian school curricula approved in 2003 by the then Minister Letizia Moratti played a major role in the marginalisation of classical studies, at least in the way classical civilisations are seen by many Italian pupils, whose feet so often walk on the traces and remains of Roman and (in southern Italy) Greek civilisations.Footnote ⁷

The 2004 reform was also, however, the starting point for our project, which was subsequently held for five years in the Province of Pisa, thanks to a cooperation between the Department of Classics of the University of Pisa, the District Council of Pisa, and local primary and lower secondary schools.

Among many other things, Moratti's reform changed the way in which the Ancient History curriculum was to be distributed throughout the stages of pupils' educational pathway: from then onwards, Ancient History is confined to Primary Education (fifth year, pupils aged 10). Before this reform, by contrast, Ancient History was taught again after primary school, at a deeper level.

Since the reform, Italian pupils now come across Greek and Roman civilisations only when they are 9 or 10 years old. Ancient History at this level contains a broad range of topics: Mesopotamian, Indian, Chinese, and Jewish Civilisations; Ancient Greece from the origins to the Hellenistic period; Ancient Rome from the origins to the dissolution of the Empire; and the beginning and development of Christian religion. Each of these topics is studied ‘using mythological texts and epics as well as some simple documentary sources as examples’ and reading ‘short texts specific to the cultural tradition of Greek, Roman and Christian civilisation with a focus on the representation of the relationship between self and others, the function of prayer, and the relationship with nature’:Footnote ⁸ quite a big task, using just short texts as examples. As far as Greek and Roman History are concerned, these are taught in the final year of primary school, before starting a different study of History in lower secondary schools, in which a more in-depth analysis of documents and data is practised whilst studying subsequent periods, from the fall of the Roman Empire to Contemporary History.

This differentiation is crucial, because it is, in a way, tantamount to stating that Ancient History can be studied using short texts as ‘examples’, while more recent history is approached with more advanced tools and interpretations.

An introduction to Educare all'Antico

We hope this introduction has clarified how the Italian education system has marginalised the study of Classical antiquity. However objectionable, when we started our project, this was – and indeed still is – the educational framework within which we were operating. We decided that the problem we were facing could be turned into both a resource and an opportunity, and started a fruitful collaboration with both primary and lower secondary schools. Within the Italian education context, this was the most original aspect of our project: universities were used to cooperating with upper secondary schools, generally in the form of conferences given to final-year pupils or seminars addressed to teachers in the form of continuing education: we chose instead to cooperate directly with the first levels of school education.

We chose to name the project Educare all'Antico (Teaching Antiquity), because we wanted to emphasise the importance of the educational factor (Teaching) and intentionally decided to avoid the idea of ‘classico’, a word that – at least in Italian – has a strong idealising connotation, especially when referring to ancient civilisations: ‘Classical’ is something to be admired, ‘Ancient’ is something to be understood.Footnote ⁹

We involved teachers in several preliminary meetings and workshops held at our university, during which we discussed the institutional aspects (the reform had just been approved, at the time) and chose the themes around which the university team was going to select Greek and Latin texts to be used and analysed by teachers with their pupils.

This ‘textual choice’ was a deliberate one. Instead of simply following pupils in what they were most acquainted with (for instance videos, videogames, coding), we chose a different strategy and printed notebooks with an old-fashioned charm to be given for free to pupils, in which they could write and draw with pencils and pens.

A team of colleaguesFootnote ¹⁰ teaching Latin or Greek at our university selected specific texts, translated (or adapted) them without avoiding ‘difficult’ words, but by explaining them with their etymology,Footnote ¹¹ and created exercises and in-depth readings around specific themes, on pages designed specifically for young pupils (squared pages for drawings, ruled pages for writing and listing new words etc).

We printed four notebooks: 1. Quaderno di cultura greca (‘Notebook on Greek culture’); 2. Quaderno di cultura romana (‘Notebook on Roman culture’); 3. I viaggi, il viaggio (‘Travels, travel’); 4. I miti il mito (‘Myths, Myth’).Footnote ¹² The topics presented were varied and chosen jointly with the schoolteachers, from local history (the arrival of Rutilius Namatianus on the coast near Pisa)Footnote ¹³ to more general concepts (such as Justice, starting from a reading of the Hesiodic passage of The Hawk and the Nightingale and his quarrel with his brother; the idea of Family in Ancient Greece, starting from Plato's Symposium) and so on.Footnote ¹⁴ A detailed table of content from Quaderno V can give an idea of the themes and texts discussed:

In order to give an idea of the work we had been doing, a very short outline of the first text listed in the table of contents shown above may be useful. The text bears the title The monster that does not welcome strangers: the Cyclops and it is a reading of the renowned passage in Odyssey IX (vv. 112–272, passim) in which the island of the Cyclopes is described and Polyphemus speaks to Odysseus, who starts to deceive the monster. We have adopted, and adapted, a printed and widely known translation of some passages,Footnote ¹⁵ added some notes (for instance about the reason why Greek galleys have the epithet ‘with cheeks of vermilion’)Footnote ¹⁶ and explained some divergences and adaptions from the translation.Footnote ¹⁷

The translation of each text is followed by a ‘Reading guide’ in which some crucial cultural issues are explored (such as thinking Otherness, describing civilised and non-civilised people according to Ancient Greek standards, sea travels in Ancient Greece), taking into account topics also covered in different chapters and aiming to encourage discussions on themes that were perceived as ‘personal’ in multi-cultural classes, in which one third of the students were not mother-tongue Italian speakers.

We encouraged reflections on how the past reflects on present themes but avoided any direct analogies between Roman and Greek civilisations, on one side, and classical and modern civilisations (because what is ‘classical’ civilisation? What is ‘modern’ civilisation?), on the other. Diachrony and difference have been leading themes in ‘teaching teachers to teach’ Classics to young pupils. We deliberately chose not to go directly into the schools (except for meetings and the final feedback) because this option would have become a sort of ‘conference’ given to pupils we did not know, thus lacking the right competences. However, in each meeting with the teachers we stressed the importance of considering diachrony as one of the most important cornerstones of the work at hand: Homer is not Plutarch, nor Vergil or Horace, because they reflect different forms of thought and forms of society. In Italy, there is a widespread tendency (in schools, in newspapers, on TV) to regard Antiquity as a sturdy monolith devoid of any internal differences, especially in the case of the so-called (and non-existent) ‘Graeco-Roman civilisation’. Our ideal target were not would-be philologists or archaeologists: we were and still are thinking of (for example) a pupil who, after lower secondary school, chooses a technical upper secondary school and then becomes (for example) a tour operator: having the right competences she or he will obtain a larger portion of market, if the point is the ‘usefulness’ of competences in Classics!

This leads us to a second topic we had been considering: the importance of working directly with sources, with some basic words and ideas explained (words like δίκη [justice], ἄνθρωπος [mankind], concepts such as ‘patronymics’) mainly through etymology in different languages. As a starting point for each lesson, we focused on the texts, not on general themes: working on the ‘original’ text, instead of reading summaries, adaptations or rewritings, gives pupils the feeling of examining sources, considering how information comes to us, and it also allows them to develop a critical eye when facing fake news.

When dealing with the episode of the Cyclops, pupils were guided by their teachers in analysing a tale most of them already knew through childhood books, comics, cartoons, sometimes even films, but from a different point of view: not simply the horrific and fantastic story of a giant monster who eats men, but a document that – through this fantastic story, very much appreciated by young pupils – can show how the Ancient Greeks of the archaic and classical period used to see (and construct) ‘otherness’ and the way to behave with strangers and hosts. We let the monster enter the classroom – to quote the title of the conference in which these ideas were first presented – but asked the monster to do what we wanted.

Throughout meetings with teachers, we kept on asking for possible corrections and new needs as felt by new pupils and teachers: this proved to be a useful feedback cycle in which ancient texts fed new needs and curiosities, brought to the university team by schoolteachers who worked with us to shape new texts. We started from Family, Friendship, Love and arrived at Travels, Myth and Archaeology.

At the end of the project, a general conference and exposition were organised, during which materials (artefacts, drawings, PowerPoint slides) made by pupils were displayed. In addition,a conference was held by the Project Coordinator who, addressing the students directly, talked about (dis)continuities between Greek civilisation and Italian culture, with a particular focus on southern Italy, its music and its language; this was made possible by listening to a popular song in Griko language, a song full of words with Greek roots.Footnote ¹⁸

It was a wonderful day due to the overwhelming reaction of many very young pupils. The funds raised to finance the project were entirely used to print the material for schools and pupils, distributed for free. Therefore, the project ended with the end of the financing. Apart from the extraordinary success with pupils who took part in the project, the main achievement of this experience was an increase of enrolments in licei in the district of Pisa after the end of the project.

After that experience, we moved on to working with upper secondary schools and, for the past two years, we have been using IT tools developed by Federico Boschetti (CNR-ILC) to tag ancient texts in their original language, with different aims and results.Footnote ¹⁹