cursiteen asked: Hi! Theancientworld brought me here. I'm currently studying my first classical philology year in the University Autonomous of Barcelona. Do you think that this kind of studies will disappear soon? How do you see our future? People always say to me that my degree is useless or that I won't have any job offers when I graduate...
The job question is complicated and I hear different opinions all the time. The market is probably different in every country, but it seems like it’s getting easier and easier to find a job teaching high-school Latin in the US, if that sounds appealing to you. And it also seems true that it’s easier to get a job at the college level if you can teach a variety of courses from archaeology to language on both the Greek and Roman side, since Classics departments are asked to retain a small faculty but teach a huge range.
Classics isn’t going to disappear soon. It’s true that Greek and Latin no longer hold the central place in the educational system; but, although I think that it might be too much ignored at the primary school level, I actually think that’s a good thing overall: there are so many other important fields of study out there. I do think that Classics provides a unique framework for liberal arts education, but I’ll leave that for another time.
Even though it has been displaced in the educational system, classes on mythology and Homer and tragedy and ancient history are still very popular at the college level. Perhaps most telling: if you look at scholarly bibliographies, more work is being published than ever before.
I do have some worries. I think that we need to do a better job convincing universities that Classics departments are worth their investment. I also think that we need to address the changing nature of classical language education. Fewer people are starting the languages at an early age, and I think that we need to make it possible both for young students to choose to do so, and also to create serious paths for students coming late to the languages. In my experience, graduate students are so busy plowing through secondary literature that we all too often don’t have a solid grasp of the primary sources. I think that etymology and vocabulary classes are a great alternative for students outside Classics departments (like medical students for instance) who can’t squeeze several years of language classes into their schedules. And I think that general language studies need more space in liberal arts programs: it shouldn’t be possible to earn a college degree without contemplating the nature of such a fundamental biological faculty and its relationship to culture. That could happen with different emphases in a number of departments (such as Linguistics, Philosophy, Biology, Psychology, or English, for example) but it would be a natural way for Classics to contribute to the educational community at large.
I could write about this for ages, so you’ll have to ask me to pick it up again sometime. Congrats on your new adventure in philology!
