By Eugenia Manolidou
A response to the debate in Greece over who should learn Ancient Greek, how it should be taught, and what we risk losing when difficulty becomes a reason to restrict access.
Within Greece’s academic and educational community, there is a debate about whether Ancient Greek should continue to be taught as a language to all students in secondary education. One proposal would concentrate language teaching in specialist classical schools, while other students would study ancient texts in translation. The concern behind this proposal deserves attention: many children find the subject difficult and discouraging. My question is whether we have sufficiently examined how we teach it before deciding who is capable of learning it.
Before concluding that a child cannot learn Ancient Greek, we need to consider how we gave that child the opportunity to learn it. If students begin by memorising grammatical forms before they can understand even a simple sentence, difficulty and discouragement are understandable. Yet when learning a language is described by academics as an ordeal from which children should be released, the discussion risks treating the failure of teaching as inevitable and the limitations of pupils as permanent.
“All human beings by nature desire to know,” Aristotle writes at the beginning of his Metaphysics: «Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει». That desire is readily apparent in childhood, in persistent questions, close observation, and the pleasure of discovery. Teaching has a responsibility to cultivate it and to organise the effort learning requires so that pupils understand its purpose.
The active use of Ancient Greek in the classroom offers one way of doing this. A child hears a comprehensible phrase, associates it with an image or an action, answers questions, and gradually progresses to reading short texts. Grammar then explains expressions the pupil has already understood, while repetition is connected to meaning and use.
Such practices have a long history in European education, particularly in the teaching of Latin, but also of Greek, where dialogues, oral exercises, and writing accompanied grammatical study. The history of classical language teaching therefore offers more possibilities than we commonly acknowledge. Using them today requires careful adaptation, suitable textbooks, and teacher training.
Translation remains indispensable for a broader acquaintance with ancient literature. Understanding even a short passage in the original, however, gives pupils confidence that they can approach the text through their own knowledge. That first achievement strengthens their confidence and gives them a reason to persevere.
One proposal in the debate would concentrate language teaching in specialist classical secondary schools for students who choose it. Establishing such schools could strengthen classical education, but it would require organisation, staffing, funding, and a geographical distribution that made attendance a realistic possibility.
Greece currently has no organised network of classical secondary schools capable of assuming that responsibility. Classical upper secondary schools did operate here, but they ceased to exist as a distinct school type under the reforms that introduced the Unified Lyceum in the late 1990s.
An educational institution can be abolished far more quickly than it can be established. Greece knows this imbalance well. Restricting teaching in existing schools in anticipation of a future institution would leave generations of pupils without provision. Their school years are finite, and no subsequent reform can restore them.
As Greece approaches the anniversary of 28 October 1940, when it resisted the Italian invasion, the newspaper front pages of that day reveal how ancient literature remained part of the country’s public language. Two Greek daily newspapers, Vradyni (“The Evening News”) and Ethnos (“The Nation”), drew on familiar ancient expressions. Vradyni printed «Ἴτε, παῖδες Ἑλλήνων», “Go forth, sons of the Greeks,” the rallying cry from Aeschylus’ account of the Battle of Salamis in Persians. Ethnos chose «Ὑπὲρ βωμῶν καὶ ἑστιῶν», “For altars and hearths,” invoking the defence of home, family, and sacred places. Faced with a new invasion, these newspapers called upon an inherited language of resistance to encourage their readers.
The rallying cry from Aeschylus’ Persians, spoken within the account of the Battle of Salamis, reappeared more than twenty-three centuries later as a newspaper headline to encourage Greeks facing another war. Its use drew on a tradition of reading, teaching, and recognition through which ancient words could still move people and express a new historical ordeal.
I wonder whether a child in Greece today can follow that connection: understand the phrase, identify its place in the tragedy, and examine its reappearance in 1940. Linguistic understanding would enable historical interpretation, while history would explain the significance of choosing those particular words. Students would then have a clear reason to attend to the language and study its forms. Their interest would extend beyond the grade in another school subject to the history and language they have inherited, the people who preserved them, and their own place in that continuing tradition.
This possibility gives us reason to seek more effective teaching. At Elliniki Agogi, we observe how encouraged children become when they understand a phrase and use what they have learned. Systematic examination of such practices can contribute to teaching with clear expectations, carefully sequenced stages, and discernible progress.
As heirs to a linguistic and intellectual tradition with more than three thousand years of written history, we also assume responsibility for its transmission. That responsibility is tested in educational decisions that enable younger generations to know and study its texts.
If Ancient Greek language teaching is removed from mainstream schooling without a viable alternative, access will depend increasingly on family income, location, and individual choices. A restriction presented as temporary relief may consequently become educational exclusion. An education system that accepts difficulty as sufficient reason to withhold knowledge relinquishes its responsibility to teach it, turning a shared inheritance into the privilege of a few.
Translated and adapted from my article “Αρχαία Ελληνικά: γνώση ή βάσανο;”, published in Greek in Proto Thema on 25 October 2026.
