Mythology in the Curriculum

A colleague of mine is teaching a class on mythology next term. Or rather she's teaching a mythology class. See, she's a Language Arts teacher (not that I have anything against language Arts teachers, in fact my favorite adult in the world is one) not a social studies teacher.

Traditionally, mythology has been the within the province of Language Arts, but the announcement that she would be teaching it and the copy of Bullfinch's Mythology on her desk made me think about where it really belongs.

As much as it makes sense that reading fictional stories and studying archetypal characters and symbolism falls into the traditional realm of the LA classes, the myths that are studied are much more than that. What we call mythology is a collection of stories from a "dead"religion. They represent the beliefs, values, history, and scientific beliefs of a culture. Those things all typically fall into the province of history or at least sociology.

So why do we surrender the teaching of mythology classes to the Language Arts Department? Part of it is the "fiction" label that is slapped on myths. Historians and other social scientists tend to think in terms of facts and data. The idea of fiction doesn't play very well.

Ideally of course mythology falls in a "Classics" department that uses an interdisciplinary approach that teaches not just who Zeus, Marduk, or Anansi are, but what they represented to their believers and who their modern equivalents are. A study of mythology should not just include the stories, but also the cultural context that gave those stories birth, the various structures of pantheons, the creation of modern myth systems and modern theories of divinity. H.P. Lovecraft, Tom Robbins, and Neil Gaiman should be taught beside Homer and the anonymous authors of Gilgamesh and Beowulf. And they should all be taught in the context of the political, social and economic systems that created them.