If you missed part 1 yesterday, go read it now.
On my last full day in Greece I went up to Thessaloniki, a city to the north, to visit Anatolia College. Anatolia has a history similar to the ACG, and is in many ways its sister institution. The college's Boston office is also just around the corner from the Congregational Library — it used to be in 14 Beacon Street itself — and so I decided to make a side-trip to the school while I was in the country.
Thessaloniki is only a 50-minute plane trip from Athens. It sits at the top of the Aegean Sea, west of Istanbul and just below Albania. The landscape and the architecture were unmistakably Greek, but there was also a more Balkan feel to it. I arrived on a gray and chilly day, and under the shadow of a looming air traffic controllers' strike.
Anatolia College is on a hill overlooking the city. My driver, who turned up 15 agonizing minutes late at the airport (!), knew just where to go. The campus is well-kept and covered with trees, all planted about seventy years ago at the behest of a past president's wife. The school has been celebrating its 125th anniversary, and those interested in the full story can watch the video they've put together.
I had lunch with President Gieseke and his wife Susan in their home on campus, and then I went on a campus tour, which encompassed the full gamut, from kindergarten to university. Anatolia is actually far more than just a "college" in the American sense of the world.
Another interesting note: I also had the chance to sit in on a presentation for school alumni — the class of 1966 — demonstrating the new "smart classroom" technology. Ten years ago, when I was still a classroom teacher, I was still holding out for chalk and overhead projectors. Now teachers can create a fully interactive lesson, projected from the computer and saved so students can review it later on, in the same sequence as pieces were written on the white board. My jaw was hanging open, though the class of 1966 was a little more skeptical than I was. What about people who don't have a computer? Is this more entertainment than education? In Thessaloniki, the answers are the same as Boston — computer technology is now so easily available and so much a part of the culture of young student that using it in the classroom is simply beyond debate. It was odd to think that I could have heard the same questions anywhere in the world today and with the same answers.
The real challenge of my trip turned out to be getting back to Athens. By late afternoon the strike had disrupted all of the air traffic in and out of Thessaloniki; I sat and sat and sat just waiting for any news at all about my flight, and beginning to wonder about finding the local Best Western. I didn't speak Greek and so all of the announcements were pretty much lost on me; even worse, I couldn’t even read the body language of the other passengers when they got various pieces of news. I concluded that people in Greece are beyond the kind of instant impatience you'd see in an American airport when they're confronted with a delay. They are more about survival than top-notch service these days.
By the time I got back to Athens I was beginning to feel a kinship with the child who screamed with utter abandon as the plane took off and landed. But I wouldn't have traded the day for anything. I know I'm seeing pieces of a much bigger story, of schools begun by the American Board in the nineteenth century and surviving into the twenty first. All of them have become basically secular in their curriculum and identity, in most cases following government dictates or the state of religious conflict in their locality. But they are secular only in a sense — it's not the same, after all, as being devoid of religion. The American Board imprint is still there, in the ethic of service, the passion for education, and the emphasis on the common good of society. And the more I see this, in different places around the world, the more I can recognize it as something distinctive and crucially important for the world's future.
-Peggy
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