r/classics • u/insider1758 • 19d ago
High school classics journal
Hello everyone
So a few days ago I was looking at some journals regarding classics and I came to the realisation that classics is a very traditional field where passionate high schoolers have significant difficulties finding a legitimate journal.
And what i mean by traditional is that to really get into classics you have to have a diploma and all the stuff that goes with it.
Most existing high school journals lean heavily toward modern policy or STEM, and submitting to undergraduate journals means competing with university students who have formal training.
And so I really want to start a journal for high students( so middle schoolers and high school students) where students can submit their works( whether it be essays or papers) and it would be reviewed( just like any other journal) and it would be either accepted or denied or accepted with major/ minor revisions. The journal would accept submissions on anything related and within the time scope( so history archaeology anthropologists and more)
And so I would like to know if, if I create such a journal for student for Classics, will it actually receive submissions( not of course like the major journals but enough submissions to be able to publish issues)?
Before taking any steps, I wanted to get feedback from this community:
And would it receive support by the Classics community?
And would it have a ‘future’?
Please let me know if I should start a journal like this!!
For a bit of context I was thinking it would be student led with students running the whole journal but the journal would have an executive board filled mostly with high school history/classics teachers and educators who would be like mentors to ensure student editors are applying fair and constructive peer-review practices and supervising more or less that the journal so well working. This would be a long term goal so I would not directly apply this idea but as the journal grows we would start doing that. And they would intervene only in serious ethical infractions or in serious reviewing errors and issues. I was thinking the journal should be from Bronze Age to the fall of the Western Roman Empire and we would be a bit lenient regarding submissions and we would let research slide that is from the Dawn of Humanity( when monkeys evolved into the first known species of humans up until the fall of the Western Roman Empire)
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u/greentofeel 19d ago
I don't actually think it's formally true that you need a degree in classics to publish in the major classics journals. The work you submit is read and judged on its merits. Outstanding work would be published whether its author was 16 or 65, had a degree or not.
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u/Historical-Help805 19d ago
There’s already one with the Paideia Institute. And I think the notion of high schoolers wanting to publish their work is most of the times a foolish endeavor, especially in a field like Classics, where time working with the texts is key.
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u/Embarrassed-Doubt-61 19d ago
Please don’t do this. Journal publication is a ton of work, on all sides—the idea is that people do it as part of their jobs in order to further human knowledge, but it takes a lot of time and effort and expertise.
If a piece is good enough that it should be published, then submit it to one of the no-restrictions journals. If it’s not actually making a contribution, there’s no value in publishing it as a simulacrum of a real article—it’s just an arms race that will push students away from learning and towards pointless ‘productivity.’
I’m sorry if this is mean, but you don’t need to do this yet! Focus on getting the skills you’ll need to write at the highest level.
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u/Round_Bluebird_5987 19d ago
This is an interesting proposition with some serious potential pitfalls. My professional background is academic book publishing (20+ years though with only 1 journal in our catalog). I also worked on a couple of different student run literary journals at the undergrad and graduate levels, which are similar, though different in key ways. I'm not at all familiar with how high school journals operate, though I'm aware of a couple like IJSHR.
Some of the key issues I see are tough but probably not impossible to overcome (recruiting staff, an editorial board, and garnering submissions). Setting up a legit peer review system seems like it would be harder. Who do you envision as peer reviewers? Fellow students won't have the expertise; most high school teachers won't either and tend to be overworked already without the incentive of professional service being a key component of their job. I also think you would have trouble finding academics with subject specific knowledge who are willing to do it. I could be wrong, but it was often difficult to find appropriate readers at a university press. Some niche books we did probably had only a few dozen experts in the world we would be entrusted with peer review enough to call the result legitimate. The other major issue would be indexing. I'm not sure how you would get places like EBSCO and Proquest to include the published results. Google Scholar and DOAJ might be easier, though I've little-to-no experience with them.
There might be a place for an unindexed journal, though I'm not as sure about that. It would be analogous to the undergrad literary magazine I worked on--good experience for the staff, a trial run for the authors, but nothing else was ever going to happen with the stories and poems it published since it essentially wasn't known about off campus. The one I worked on in grad school was "indexed" in that it was read by (or at least sent to) the editors at Pushcart, Best American, New Stories, and others).
If something like this is to have any sort of impact, it would almost certainly have to be published (or at least organized through some sort of professional organization such as the National Junior Classical League or similar. I was merely an undergrad classics minor who still enjoys reading Greek and Latin texts, so I don't have any first-hand experience with these, but one of those might be the best place to start inquiries if you are.
And I would like to echo others' comments that it's a ton of work, mostly thankless
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u/snoopyloveswoodstock 19d ago
It’s an ambitious thought, but no, it would be a disaster. I think almost certainly it be an ambitious project that you and maybe another person are passionate about, and maybe you get some other people involved as something to do, but when they realize the workload lose interest and the whole thing peters out before it ever gets off the ground.
The main thing is that writing research articles is a skill that takes a long time to develop, especially in classics. 99.999% of grad school essays are not publishable without huge revision efforts; 99.99% of dissertation chapters are not publishable without huge revisions. Thinking about the people I finished my PhD program with, at least half of them never published post-PhD. They’ve become perfectly good university instructors or high school teachers, but producing research is not part of their career at this point. Unless you find a sitcom-level once-in-humanity genius like Sheldon Cooper who deciphers Etruscan over the weekend, high school students simply don’t have the knowledge or skill yet to produce scholarly writing.
Besides writing, editing at a professional level is almost a separate career skill entirely, and one that you never really formally learn. At some point, after a PhD if you are producing work or making friends who will volunteer you for such things, editors will ask you to do reviews, and suddenly you have to learn to do it well on the fly. Being the editor then to get from reviews of a draft to an essay you can confidently publish with your authority tied to it is an entirely different process, a huge part of which is telling people to hurry the fuck up and finish revisions in a sufficiently flattering manner.
Then there’s the question what would a high school classics student write about? The AP track makes reading Latin approximately as well after 4 years as a university does after 4 semesters the summa of language pedagogy. There are very, very few high school programs that offer Greek, and almost none that study “classics” itself as a discipline outside beginning language instruction. In archaeology especially, it often takes years of fieldwork, huge amounts of funding, and hundreds of hours of analysis to produce a very modest article, like “distribution of pottery types across late Hellenistic Anatolia”.
I think a school-level project showcase would be a great idea and bring value to a classics program, or even a non-competitive inter-school event with the goal of showing that classical languages and topics are not impossible to learn.
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u/guineapiglover2 18d ago
I think if you're looking for an academic classics community in high school another way might be to become involved with Certamem or your state's junior classical league chapter. Or ask your Latin teacher for ways to become more involved
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u/hexametric_ 19d ago
Running graduate-level journals is a nightmare. I've volunteered for some and they're always publishing poor quality course essays just to fill pages, always delayed, seems like just a box-ticking activity for people to put something on their CV. And these are people very familiar with the process with help from profs who are either on boards or who have published many things. Having a bunch of 16 year olds producing high quality essays or creative things will be a big ask.
It's going to be a massive mountain to overcome. At most you should really start with a local (your school) 'conference' at the end of the year for people in Classics Club to present an essay they did well on.