Schools which drop Latin completely.
Schools which think that modern language learning is better.
Schools which believe that Mandarin Chinese is the Wave of the Future.
These schools, the administrators who run them, and the the trustees/regent types who tacitly or openly condone such actions and the belief systems whence they spring, are ruining their own academic integrity.
Worse, they are setting their students up for failure.
Failure on every level.
How?
By stripping students of the opportunity to establish foundational linguistic understanding, one which Latin, and Latin alone, achieves for the speaker of English.
How did this happen? In next few posts, I will be addressing these issues.
I'll begin with where and how Latin Lost Its Way.
Let's Face It.
Latin has been taught in - to put it mildly - an inaccessible manner.
Not just for years.
For centuries.
Poor pedagogy has fed the bondfire of the ever more widely-held belief:
"only the most academically advanced/gifted/brightest students have a prayer of ever learning Latin."
The Message:
"If you aren't gifted, you aren't good enough."
Students' translation:
"You can only learn Latin if you're super smart"
ergo,
"I'm not taking Latin, so I must not be smart."
ergo
"I must be stupid."
Factor into this the shift in the American attitude about learning languages to a type of linguistic utilitarianism -
"Learn a Language That You'll Use, Like Spanish"
"Spanish is preferable to French, but French is better than nothing"
"Let's All Learn Mandarin Chinese"
(The Latest So-Called "Language of the Future", replacing Arabic, which replaced Spanish, which replaced Russian as former "Languages of the Future" according to Public School educator Honchos and NAIS)
And folks come to the insidious, dangerous, but not unpredictable conclusion,
"If it's dead, why learn it at all?"
and the equally shallow
"If most of the world doesn't speak it, why should you?")
Surprise, Surprise!
The study of Latin finds itself beleaguered, if not endangered.
Yet Latin was the language of Europe for over a millenium – one that was so flexible, it gave rise to an entire family of languages, and greatly influenced and affected the development of English. St. Jerome's Vulgate is proof of that – the Vulgate, the Bible for the Common Man, was written in the Common Man's tongue: Latin. Yet the feeling of the inaccessibility, and therefore of the uselessness of Latin, persists. Classicists have felt the public's loss of understanding. School systems have done away with Latin on utilitarian grounds. Even in private schools, Latin and the classics have lost their footing.
To restore Latin's lost prestige and traditional place in the typical school curriculum, classicists have in the last thirty years or so come up with several different approaches, all with emphasis on reading Latin. The Cambridge Latin Reading Course, Ecce Romani, the Oxford Latin Reading Course, and Latin Via Ovid are examples. The Cambridge series, for instance, has students reading about a family in First Century Britain around the time of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Italy; the Oxford, meanwhile, follows the life of the Young Horace, the great Latin lyric poet. Ecce Romani chronicles the life of another Roman family. The didactic premise of all these works is this: students learn more effectively when they read a story than when they have to sit down and just memorize paradigms and forms. As far as that goes, the premise is sound. No classicist would deny that it is wonderful for students to read Latin from day one. But what type of Latin are they in fact reading? And here is what we find. They are learning a lot about culture; they also learn about history and Roman politics. Again, all to the good. But the main question is this: What are the students learning about how to read Latin -- not canned Latin, but real Latin? The texts are effective in Europe because the people who teach Latin there know the language and its background extremely well. If the teachers did not, then these texts would be useless. And this is what has happened. Now students like these books; they also wouldn't mind eating nothing but candy for a week. These texts tend to give students a false sense of accomplishment.
More Tomorrow.