Monday, September 17, 2012
Education Problems: Past and Present
Today, I was re-reading Sarah Ruden's translation, shortly after completing my readings for my education class. The beginning of Part 1 of the Satyricon begins with a complaint about education. It reads, "Young men weren't shut in by declamatory exercises when Sophocles and Euripedes were finding the perfect words. There was no professor blasting down talent from his ivory tower when Pindar and the nine lyric poets shied away from the Homeric verse and took up a more modest genre." Not being all together with it yet this morning, I forgot what I was reading and thought it was one of my education texts. Many of the problems discussed in this text reflect, almost identically on the texts we are reading in my other class about how standardized tests greatly narrow the school curriculum. "Every genre was poisoned by the same diet and cut short of a grand old age." This speaks to the problem of a strict and not at all diverse system that schools are turning to today. I just thought it was interesting how closely related the problems were, being that they are two significantly different time periods.
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2 comments:
Allison,this could be a great paper topic-- or a great topic for a course. How to teach, what to teach, what effects teaching have on students and society were all hotly debated by the Greeks and the Romans, and I suspect that if we had more of the Satyricon than the fragments, we would find that Petronius was taking on these topics systematically. It is relatively easy to dismiss this with the thought 'nihil sub sole novum' nothing is new under the sun, but the fact that we are still wrestling with the same issues and still have not been able to resolve them suggests that they are fundamental to our own understanding of our identities and our vision of what the function of society should be. Encolpius' reactions to what he perceives as Trimalchio's lack of education permeate the Cena, and it is significant that he and Agamemnon and Ascyltos crash the dinner party because they have a perceived social status as 'scholastici.' This is a theme we should all track as we read...it will be relevant to Apuleius as well.
You're right Allison. I guess the whole Roman Empire vs. USA comparison has some merit.
In all seriousness, you have to wonder why this happened. Why did the education system shift so much, I wonder?
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