A Daughter of Ulysses

Ever since the wily Ulysses ruled both islands, it has been said that the smartest of all Greeks come from neighboring Ithaca and Cephalonia. Last week one of the smartest and pertest daughters of Ulysses' ancient offshore island of Cephalonia was busily masterminding a top-to-bottom reorganization of the Greek public school system so basic as to change norms laid down by Plato and Aristotle themselves. "In ancient Greece," said Dr. Kalliniki Dendrinou Antonakaki last week, as Parliament debated implementation of her newly adopted Educational Reform Act, "education taught only the pursuit of the esthetic ideals of truth and beauty. Now that society has changed, education must change too."

"Nike" Antonakaki, 51, is a cabinetmaker's daughter who worked out her ideas for updating Aristotle while writing a doctoral thesis on Greek education at Columbia University's Teachers College. Returning to Athens in 1955 with her journalist husband as the first Greek citizen to hold a U.S. doctorate in education, Dr. Antonakaki took a job as adviser to the Ministry of Education and began agitating for a progressive school system in Greece. Like Xenocrates' shoe, she argued, the old system was of good, polished leather but it no longer fit the foot. "Now science has invented the machine which Aristotle sought to replace the slave," she said, and instead of segregating intellectual and manual skills in separate high schools, Greece should restore the classic ideal of "harmony," teach knowledge and technique to both hand workers and brain workers.

When diehards denounced Dr. Antonakaki for bringing in "alien American influence," she retorted: "Heraclitus [circa 500 B.C.] was the first pragmatist," and he believed that the educator "establishes the productive relation of knowledge to life." She put her theories to the pragmatic test by founding a school in Piraeus where for three years orphan boys who had failed their entrance exams for the old-style classical high schools got the new, "harmonized" course of studies. When her students did better on their physics exams after three years than the traditionally educated students did after six, government officials were impressed. Last spring Dr. Antonakaki's draft bill for school reform was put forward by the Education Minister with Premier Constantine Karamanlis' enthusiastic support. The changes involve curriculum, teacher training and the very rebuilding of the schools themselves. Last month, after the authoress herself had testified eleven days before committees, the bill was unanimously adopted.

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