Teaching Australians how to be Greeks

“IT’S A PRONOUN, a pronoun,” the black-eyed youngster shouts in raucously recognisable Australian. His triumph is shortlived. A boy of about nine corrects him in an equally broad accent: “A personal pronoun.” This exchange rings across the room, punctuated on either side by a constant babble of Greek between the children and their teacher.
Three days a week after school these kids meet together. They range in age from seven to about 14. On’ alternate afternoons a younger crowd comes along to the old hall next to St. Sophia Cathedral in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. All of them, like so many Greek children in Australian cities, are twice schooled: going from what they call the “English schools” to the ethnic schools to learn the language of their parents and acquire a feeling of their cultural “apartness” through lessons on Greek history, geography and the Orthodox faith. Private and parochial schools are a familiar feature of Australian education. A few cultural and religious groups maintain a handful of schools which teach in terms of their pupils’ divergent birthrights rather than have these swallowed by the undiscriminating maw of public education.
The Greek schools are quite different. An adjunct rather than an alternative to mass education, they flourish wherever Greeks have settled in Australia. It is hard to get exact figures, but social workers and researchers in the community guess that almost half the first generation Greek families with children patronise the schools. The Greek Orthodox community— split from the N.S.W. Archdiocese some ten years ago—finances and runs 25 ethnic schools around Sydney. Some 2000 youngsters attend the community’s classes. There were 30 of them in the St. Sophia class, and the teacher had evidently expected more, making unnecessary apologies to me for eight or so empty seats. Numbers in the schools will vary with the locality and the size of the Greek population in the area. The N.S.W. Archdiocese of the Greek Orthodox Church oversees the activities of a further group of schools, whose organisation is handled mainly at the local level—in Sydney, by 16 parishes. Each has its own church and school, some have more than one. Father John Pappas, a spokesman for the Archdiocese, wasn’t certain of the exact number but thought there were probably more than 20 such schools. The N.S.W. Archdiocese was established in 1908 and the first school was set up shortly after. At St. Sophia, teacher Mrs. Fofy Alexiadis, who has taught there for eight years, speaks in Greek to the children, occasionally asking one of them to explain to me. A plump brown-uniformed lass complies readily: “He said he forgot his books, so teacher asked, ‘Does a soldier go to war without a gun?’ Mrs. Alexiadis nods encouragingly: “They help me with the English.”
The children mostly read and scribble away industriously, but when their teacher comes to the back to try to explain things to me the noise crescendoes, with English mostly heard. Sophia Zaropoulis is 11 and has her blonde hair caught in a pony-tail. I ask her about coming to this school-away from-school. The soft voice is barely accented. “Sometimes I like it, but after I come back from the English school I am sometimes tired.” Sophia’s father works for a tyre factory, her mother does piecework at home, sewing coats and dresses. “My father was born in Greece and didn’t get to finish school because of the war, so he didn’t learn English, but he speaks a little now. Sometimes at dinner he says, ‘Speak in Greek, I don’t understand you’. Sophia was born here. Her parents send her to the afternoon school, “so I can learn how to write in Greek and write to my uncles in Greece and speak better Greek.” Something she said summed up what could later become an agonising tussle for these children: “When I was smaller I liked Greece a lot, but now if someone asked me I just couldn’t choose.”
When you ask the children and their parents about going to the Greek schools, they say it is to learn spoken and written Greek better. Indeed, there is a great difference between the demotic Greek spoken in their homes and the “literary” Greek taught by the ethnic schools. Many see a chance of going back to Greece, perhaps permanently, and you wonder if it is an indictment of Australia and our “she’ll be right” attitudes to new settlers.
Mrs. Dorothy Buckland, a Greek born, part-time social worker with the community, says, “There is very little motivation in the Greek-settled areas to learn English. And in the factories they deliberately put in Greek or Italian foremen it is not in their interests for the workers to learn English for then the men become mobile and may look for better jobs. “Now the children integrate first,” says Mrs. Buckland, “then the fathers and then maybe the mothers.”
(In regard to this, she said that the incidence of minor psychiatric problems among Greek women has increased alarmingly over the past few years.) It is clear enough that the parents, perhaps floundering in a world so different from the village life most of them knew, are terrified that their children will grow into something, they do not understand. Inevitably the language barrier exacerbates parental fears of losing contact.
Gillian Bottomley, studying second generation Greeks in Sydney for a doctorate in Social Anthropology, says one of the few ways parents can relate to the changed environment is to send their children to the ethnic schools. In essence, the schools are serving an adaptive rather than strictly teaching function, though the parents I spoke to do not see this or cannot articulate it. In Greece the family hierarchy is well defined and distinctly patriarchal. This set-up is eroded when the families migrate the youngsters take on a central role simply because they are the first to speak English. They must act as intermediaries in all kinds of situations with officials, teachers, doctors and the like. The role reversals pose a real threat to parental feelings of security: “In Greece men are men,” a Greek woman says tellingly.
Most people who have worked with them are certain that the Greeks are suspicious of the public schools here. Used to a fairly authoritarian system in both schools and homes they worry that Australian schools are too permissive. Some parents expressed this to me by questioning the lack of home work. Moreover, relating to an impersonal system like the Department of Education is hard for those from a peasant culture. “It’s very difficult for them to hand their children over to a bureaucracy,” Gillian Bottomley explains. She has found that the ethnic schools give parents some sense of controlling what their children are doing.
Expecting to find that parents were strongly encouraged to send their children to the ethnic schools, I found instead that parents are very positive about the schools—the question of persuasion doesn’t come up. If the schools are seen as helping to bridge the wide gap between the cultures, it may help explain their pervasiveness and their popularity. In this context it is also important that the Greek Orthodox faith is ethnically defined and that ties with  the Church, even for those who accept few of its teachings, are fairly central to life in Greece. There is something else: “When they go to the Greek schools they stop feeling ‘dago’—it gives them a pride in what they are, something to hold on to,” says Mrs. Buckland. In the St. Sophia hall, yellowing pictures of Christ, the Apostles and Greek saints and heroes are stuck to the walls. The battered texts the youngsters use are entirely in Greek. But it is not only the outward trappings —the language, the religion—that matter here. In this class 30 children can start to express a vital and often-denied part of themselves. Accommodation is one of the biggest problems in financing the schools, Mrs. Buckland tells me. The Greek Orthodox community tried for permission to use the public schools but were told by the Department of Education that this would interfere with arrangements for cleaning the schools in the afternoons. Given the significant adaptive function of the Greek schools, one might have expected some interest from the N.S.W. Department of Education. But no. Rules are rules. Ideally, the public schools themselves would offer courses in Greek (and, of course, the languages of the other large and less easily assimilated migrant groups). There were discussions in Melbourne last year about introducing Modern Greek in the schools, Mrs. Buckland tells me. But still it’s probably a long way off.