The Future of Education

The aim of this paper is to present my experience as a professor of Ancient Greek in the context of university education in Portugal. Indeed, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, thanks to the policies pursued by successive ministers of education for the last decades, the study of this classical language, which is almost extinct in the curricula of primary and secondary school, is also residual in higher education. Only five out of the eleven public universities that exist in Portugal offer the possibility of attending Ancient Greek classes. This is the case of the Faculty of Arts, University of Porto, where I work.

Under these circumstances, when they enter higher education, most students (which normally, also never had Latin) have the opportunity to attend classes of these languages as non-compulsory options. Therefore, given the abundance of other subjects, more modern and less demanding of constant work, this course does not usually have a large numbers of students. That is why, since, in 2010, I began to teach two begginner levels of this language, I have sought to make more dynamic and interesting content and classes (without neglecting necessary rigor), so that, aroused the interest and passion for study of Ancient Greek, the students themselves incite colleagues to attend these classes.

In order to this, I have been using new technologies of education, namely Moodle (where besides having access to the materials used in the classes, they take their exams) and other teaching strategies that require constant students involvement. The results have been excellent, I have obtained success rates between ninety and one hundred percent, and most importantly, students extraordinarily motivated and happy to learn a language usually considered extremely difficult.