In the 1990s Mari and I ran a Semester in Greece program for our college, The College of St. Rose in Albany NY. I thought you might be interested in how it looked and went. It was based in a small city on the extreme Western end of Crete named Sitia where we already had some good Greek friends. We ran the program for three consecutive Fall semesters. Because of the price differential between America and Greece, we were able to offer the entire semester, apart from travel, for the same cost as a semester on campus. We averaged 15 students a semester. Mari and I spent the summers just before the fall semesters living in this same city, so we got to know many people and our way around.
We rented a small villa on the edge of town with four students to an apartment. Each had its own living room, kitchen, and bath. The students shopped and cooked for themselves. The villa was within a half-hour’s walking distance from town. We were within walking distance to the beaches and stores, etc. The Culture local folks were kind and happy to have us as part of their community.
The core of the program was the course work, which included a double credit Greek Language and Culture course, involving a weekly Greek dinner fixed by the students, daily Greek lessons, and twice-weekly dance lessons. The language class met daily. The students chose three other courses from: Greek Art, novels by Nikos Kazantzakis a famous Cretan author, Philosophy of Education, and Ancient Greek Philosophy. I taught most of these latter courses, while Mari taught the Greek Art course.
Needless to say, the students especially enjoyed mixing with the local people in the cafes and stores, along with the daily trip to the beach. Night life was pretty serious, so we had to keep on them rather carefully. They did their own shopping and laundry, which was quite different from home – by hand, without machines. By and large we all devoted afternoons to study, with classes held in the mornings. All in all the students got along well with each other and the local people very well. The young women were especially attractive to the local young men, and vice versa. As “parents” Mari and I tried to strike a balance between supervision and freedom. It seemed to work out well.
In many ways the highpoints of the semester were the trips to historical sites. We did a week-long Minoan tour to the ruins on Crete and Santorini, another week-long Ancient Greek tour to Olympia and Delphi, and we spent the final week of the program in Athens touring museums and the Parthenon. We had a good friend who ran a large, successful tour-bus company and we travelled by bus mostly, but obviously sometimes travel by ship was also necessary. It was a great thrill and privilege to sail the Mediterranean. With daily lectures, of course.
Perhaps the highpoint was an unexpected opportunity to take a four -day
“quick trip” to Egypt, for a surprisingly low price. We went on a first-rate ship, with all meals included, to Alexandria and the next day to Cairo and the Pyramids, then back again to Crete. The students paid their own way and we had no mishaps. To be sure, Alexandria seemed like a place out of the movies, and it made Mari and I pretty nervous walking through the narrow streets of the bazars responsible for the safety of the students. A young man with a black eye patch, who called himself “Sammy Davis Jr.” offered to be our guide. It all worked out very well.
It was, of course, a fantastic thing to go inside the Great Pyramid and see some of the tombs.
The whole semester was, of course, a once-in-a-lifetime experience for all the students and we had no difficulty recruiting students for the next semester. At first a good number of the faculty were suspicious that the whole program was a boon-doggle on our part to be able to live in Greece. After they met the students who had been on the trip, however, the mood changed and we had full faculty support. We, in addition to several of the students, have returned to Sitia several times. One of the students actually married one of the young men there and has raised her family there. The whole experience was a wonderful gift to both of us.

As everyone knows, Noam Chomsky is both one of the world’s reigning experts on the nature of language and the brain’s acquisition thereof. He is also widely known for his views on various socio-political issues around the globe. I have attended several conferences where his views on language acquisition was the main topic, and at one of these Chomsky himself was actually a participant. I will not pretend that I understand all of the views and issues involved in this very complex topic, but here I shall attempt to track the development of his thought.
As I understand it Chomsky’s initially very influential theory was that the brain arrives already programed to perform certain operations on the verbal input it receives from the surrounding human linguistic world. Thus, barring various defects, all humans come equipped with the innate ability to participate in human linguistic interchange. The human brain is structured in advance to be able to receive and make sense out of the human noises it receives no matter what linguistic input they initially receive. Thus any child born anywhere can learn its mother tongue naturally.
Over the years Chomsky received, and successfully answered, many challenging questions and objections. However, at the conference I attended at MIT in Boston in 1984 he openly admitted that he had found it necessary to alter his initial views. Chomsky now claimed, in a paper entitled “Changing Perspectives on Knowledge and Use of Language,” that although all humans are born with the same cranial apparatus that governs how we in general deal with the various linguistic inputs we receive, these inputs are so varied that they need to be and are sorted out by some intermediary processes which initially respond to the respective inputs. Thus, the innate structural apparatus is not sufficient to fully explain how the brain processes the linguistic input.
Chomsky suggested that it would be helpful to posit an additional cognitive apparatus that functions in between the initial receptors and the linguistic output itself which accounts for the immense diversity thereof. He imaged this additional apparatus as a set of switches which would be set by the interaction between the basic structure of the brain and the empirical input received through linguistic and social interaction. Thus Chomsky admitted that his initial, somewhat rationalistic, views were insufficient to cover the huge variety of subtle differences which are part and parcel of regular human discourse but differ from language to language.
Thus there was now a more “empirical” or experiential dimension to Chomsky’s approach than he had at first acknowledged. Although no young speaker of a language is now seen as already programmed at birth openly receptive to any and all languages, he or she does come with a brain capable of acquiring any language. In addition, each would-be speaker of any language also comes equipped with a set of adjustable switches which can be set in accordance with daily experiential input. These switches are perhaps put in place by virtue of the concrete experience of each speaker through on-going encounters with one’s environment, both physical and social.
So the question of language acquisition is addressed with a more complex model than Chomsky originally proposed. Language acquisition is now seen as a two-step phenomenon involving both preset categories and ongoing experience. This approach seems to me to be more inline, for instance, with that of the later Wittgenstein for whom linguistic is immensely flexible and to a large degree open-ended. Incidentally, Professor Chomsky seems now to have taken up a semi-permanent position at the University of Arizona in Tucson where he is a frequent speaker on both linguistic and political issues.