The classics give us “direct access” to questions humanity has asked for thousands of years, Eugenia Manolidou, director of Elliniki Agogi – a school dedicated to the teaching the Ancient Greek language, classical history, and philosophy in Athens, Greece, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday.
Discussing the reemergence of the classics in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Manolidou, wife of Greece Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis spoke about her background as a musician, noting that much of her music was inspired by ancient Greek culture and mythology.
“So then, about 10 years ago, I became the director of Elliniki Agogi, which is an institution, an educational institution in Athens that teaches ancient Greek to kids and adults. So I thought to myself, if I’m going to direct a school of ancient Greek, then I have to learn ancient Greek myself,” she said.
“So I began studying a very different approach to teaching Classical languages, and it was that experience that changed everything for me, because suddenly I realized something rather shocking about my own education. Because I had studied ancient Greek for four years in high school, I had always loved the ancient Greek culture. I had even composed music inspired by it, and yet after four years of studying the language, I could hardly understand it, and even worse, I had not enjoyed learning it. So I realized that the problem was not ancient Greek, but it was the way that I had been taught,” Manolidou revealed, noting that this realization fundamentally changed the direction of her life.
“I wanted children to have the experience I didn’t have. I wanted them to discover that ancient Greek can be approached as a language, not as an academic subject. Something that they can hear, understand, speak, perform, and enjoy. And that gradually became my work and my mission to show that ancient Greek and Latin, as well, can be taught in a way that brings young people closer to the classical world and makes them want to keep exploring it,” she said, noting that the classics “give us direct access to some of the great questions humanity has been asking for thousands of years.”
FILE/Greek classical music composer, conductor and educator Eugenia Manolidou talks with students of “Elliniki Agogi” school at Zappeion Hall in Athens, Greece, July 15, 2022. (Lefteris Partsalis/Xinhua via Getty Images)
“Remember that we learn ancient Greek and Latin to read the texts from the original, so those texts teach us how we should live. What makes a good citizen? What do we owe our family and our community? What are courage, justice, loyalty? What is freedom? And all these questions are still with us. This is why Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Socrates can still speak to a young person today,” she said, expressing her hope to give her children access to this.
“So let them read the authors, let them question them, argue with them, make up their own mind. I think this is what educators should do, and this is what the classics really do very well, especially today,” she said, as she discussed how this affects younger generations in Western culture as well, as history “teaches us that civilizations face very serious challenges in every generation.”
“So, the great value of studying history, of studying philosophy, of studying the classics is that we see how people before us confronted those circumstances, confronted war, political division, social change, questions of leadership, the responsibility of citizenship,” she said.
“So the classical world does not give us simple answers, but it gives us extraordinary examples to think with. For example, Thucydides,” she added. “He understood fear, power, and conflict with remarkable depth. The Greek philosophers asked what makes a society just, and what makes a good citizen. So when the West faces serious challenges today, returning to these texts gives us perspective. We discover that many of the questions we consider uniquely modern have, in fact, been troubling human beings for thousands of years.”
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