On Alice Van Vliet

An exploration into the life of an American schoolteacher in New York at the turn of the 20th century, her experiences, her writings, and some reflections on the way things have changed since then

The New York Latin Leaflet was a publication that began at the turn of the 20th century dedicated to the discussion of teaching methods in the field of the classics. For the modest subscription price of 25¢ per year, high school teachers and college professors could exchange notes on standards and expectations for their students in order to express what has been useful to them and what hasn’t. A few years of successful operation later, the organization was bought out and transformed into the academic journal The Classical Weekly, which eventually folded into what we now know as Classical World. Even in the early days of its apomythosis,¹ the journal attracted the contributions of such scholars as Herbert C. Nutting, Augustus T. Murray, Duane Reed Stuart, and H. R. Fairclough. These are not household names by any stretch of the imagination, but any classicist worth their salt will recognize them by their contributions to the field, if not necessarily by name. It is not, however, these prolific scholars that interest me.

An old adage has been twisted to disparage educators in our modern age: “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Regardless of one’s feelings about the quote, it’s undeniable that those first seven years of The New York Latin Leaflet show that some can both do and teach, even at the same time. In between the articles titled “Extracts from a Teacher's Notebook,” for example, there are tidbits of genuine scholarship about Vergil, Caesar, and Cicero’s writings on a line-by-line basis. Having a direct connection to a population of inquisitive students permits teachers access to the kinds of questions that a team of the most erudite scholars locked in a room together could not dream of asking. Keep in mind, the Loeb Classical Library and all its useful footnotes began its publication five years after the end of the Leaflet. These teachers are either using Oxford or Teubner editions of the relevant texts. Basic readers and handbooks certainly exist at this time; one needs only to check the advertisements sections in the back matter of these journals to confirm their presence,² but teachers seem to prefer to create and use original material as exercises for their classrooms.

Did these methods indeed better educate their students? A definitive answer would be outside the scope of what this humble newsletter may determine, but to shape a better understanding of the average pre-collegiate classics education of the early 20th century is well within our bounds. In order to do so, I have selected one contributor to the Leaflet to analyze at random, and totally not because I stole her idea for a poem a few months ago and feel indebted to her memory. Because primary and secondary school educators rarely make headlines, most of the archives that contain the material such projects would rely on have not been digitized. On top of the research itself I would need to make day trips to archives in order to complete further entries if this were to become a series.

Alice Van Vliet was born January 11th, 1874 and died on September 6th, 1935. Her father may have been a grain merchant who traveled between Buffalo, Green Bay, and Chicago to trade his goods,³ and her mother was a member of the prominent Stone-Collins family of Connecticut. They wed in August of 1872 in a service officiated by her father.⁴ Her younger sister, an allegedly prominent kindergarten teacher, died at age 23 of typhoid.⁵ After graduating as valedictorian of Chicago’s South Division High School,⁶ she received a degree from the University of Chicago in 1896. Alice then moved to Brooklyn to teach Latin at the Berkeley Carroll School for the next school year,⁷ and later became the Director of Greek and Latin at the Packer Collegiate Institute until 1922. In 1924, she began correspondence from Europe back to her friends in America, earning her keep at the Headington School for Girls, which eventually resulted in a degree in Classical Moderations at Oxford in April of 1926.⁸ When she returned to America the next year, she accepted a job at the Katharine Branson School in Ross, California and stayed through the spring of 1934.⁹ Though I have been unable to find an obituary at time of writing, by all accounts she remained on the west coast until her death, while her grave resides alongside her mother, her father, and her sister in Danbury, Connecticut. Two years after her death, her friends published a limited run of some of her more notable poetry, including a translation of Vergil’s first eclogue, “Commonwealth,” which made it into the Atlantic Magazine, and her most famous work “The Nations of Antiquity.”