Two things occasion my reflection today. Firstly, the crisis now engulfing U Chicago, and its internal documents circulated, regarding cutting humanities, languages in particular, sending students off to other institutions, trying to get AI to teach languages. There’s a lot more to be said about that, and this isn’t the place for it nor am I the person. It does, however, reflect ongoing decline in languages, including or especially classical languages, in university and college contexts. In Australia, I could point to several institutions currently gutting their humanities departments, shutting down classical language lines due to lack of students, and the number of places where it will be possible to learn Ancient Greek in a class will soon be down to very few indeed.

Secondly, I was asked recently about some tutoring, and not being able to take this particular student on I had to go and do some due diligence about other providers I could send them to. Where can you send someone to get a decent education in Ancient Greek, particularly with good language pedagogy? The answer, again, is not many places.

My main point today is that the ‘not many places’ are almost all not-institutional. At best they are small institutions (Polis is probably the most formal and most accredited institutional type); otherwise they are generally institutional-adjacent/parallel/outwith. This is where good quality Ancient Greek pedagogy mostly resides – with a small handful (growing, though) of highly motivated and highly skilled speakers and practitioners of Greek, who have committed themselves to communicative methods, and are prepared to go all-in. Few of them reside in institutions of the traditional kind.

In the New Testament Greek ‘sphere’, this is probably exemplified by the two trends in continuing tension. On the one hand, you have the growth of things like Biblingo, and an ongoing minority interest in communicative approaches, on the other hand you have the ongoing decline of Greek studies at seminary level. Fewer programs require it, it’s mostly not taught well, and most graduates struggle to retain or use their Greek in pastoral office. I know of only two institutions utilising communicative practices in a seminary context in North America (please let me know of others!)

The simple fact is that I would struggle to tell anybody that the place they should go to learn Ancient Greek is an old-style institution like a college or university. Few of them are teaching Greek, fewer are teaching it well, and the amount of money students are putting up for that kind of education could better be spent elsewhere. As far as I can tell, most of the leading lights of communicative Greek competency and well-founded Second Language Acquisition pedagogical practices exist on the fringe, adjacent and adjunct to larger institutions if at all, forming alternative networks of education and communities of practice.