History of Teaching Classical Languages
Why should specialised pedagogy concern itself with the history of its discipline and the teaching associated with it? Is it not the task of specialised pedagogy to deal exclusively with urgent problems of current or even future teaching?
However, subject pedagogy can only fulfil this undoubtedly important task if it also deals with its past. However, historical research into the school subjects Latin and Greek does not merely serve to reconstruct the past, but is intended to create an awareness of the history of effects that is significant for current theory and practice by securing and analysing historical facts. It is extremely fruitful to deal with concepts that were developed in past eras for the learning of Latin and Greek as foreign languages at school and are often discussed in a modified form in the present. The examination of the history of our own subjects thus creates a sound understanding of the conditionality of the current situation. For example, our newly developed competency model for Latin lessons was strongly inspired by Wilhelm von Humboldt's ideas on the general education of human beings. As Latin and Greek are among the oldest school subjects, historical studies in this field are particularly fruitful.
Dealing with the history of teaching classical languages is also an indispensable part of the teaching concept of the Berlin classics pedagogy department. Every prospective teacher of Latin and Greek should be familiar with the key features of the history of these subjects in order to be able to justify and critically assess the aims and methods of teaching to the public both inside and outside school and to gain guidance and inspiration for their own practice. For this reason, we familiarise Latin students with the history of Latin textbooks from the great educationalist Comenius in the 17th century to the present day in the 21st century. In the Bachelor's degree programme in Greek, we deal with the educational movement of humanism, which has had a lasting influence on the teaching of Greek since the early modern period.
Read more:
Kipf, Stefan (2009). Historia magistra scholae? Historische Bildungsforschung als Aufgabe altsprachlicher Didaktik, in: PegOn 1, 1-19. (http://www.pegasus-onlinezeitschrift.de/2009_1/erga_1_2009_kipf.html)
Kipf, Stefan (2020). Altsprachlicher Unterricht in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Historische Entwicklung, didaktische Konzepte und methodische Grundfragen von der Nachkriegszeit bis zum Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, Heidelberg: Propylaeum. (https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/propylaeum/catalog/book/618)
Kipf, Stefan (2023). Geschichte des altsprachlichen Unterrichts, in: Stefan Kipf, Markus Schauer (Hrsg.): Fachlexikon zum Latein- und Griechischunterricht. Tübingen; Narr, 276-283.