Dr Lorna Robinson: 'Latin inspires and enthuses children'
Digg
del.icio.us
Facebook
Reddit
Google
Stumble Upon
Fark
Newsvine
YahooBuzz
Bebo
Twitter
Independent Minds
The Romans may have sailed from Britain's shores more than 1,500 years ago but Latin is far from a dead language when it comes to teaching and inspiring children in primary schools.
Children have so much to learn and understand in schools today that it can seem unfair to demand even more of them by adding Latin to their workload. But teaching Latin can offer great benefits. Rather than weigh them down, it can serve to enthuse them.
In offering Latin to children in inner London and Oxford the Iris Project has found that one of its main effects was to help considerably with literacy. It fits neatly into Key Stage 2 learning for vocabulary and grammar.
The first thing we did was show children Latin words that have a connection with modern English. Very quickly the children were spotting connections themselves and thoroughly enjoying doing it.
Latin undeniably helps children to learn other languages, especially the modern European languages which evolved from it. It also offers useful cross-curricular links because it is relevant to subjects as diverse as history, geography and the sciences.
There are a lot of preconceptions about Latin and it is seen by many people as an élite subject because it was traditionally taught in private schools. What we found when we introduced it to schools in deprived areas was that the children were proud to be taught it. It meant they were being treated the same as children from more privileged areas.
The author is the director of the Iris Project which promotes classics in schools
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Offensive or abusive comments will be removed and your IP logged and may be used to prevent further submission. In submitting a comment to the site, you agree to be bound by the Independent Minds Terms of Service.
- Print Article
- Email Article
-
Click here for copyright permissions
Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
Comments
English doesn't have a Latin root. It's a Germanic language with a lot of French vocabulary grafted on after the Norman conquest - which is, indeed, Latin at one remove - and Latin-derived words added in later (17th century onwards).
If William the Bastard hadn't won at Hastings, we'd be speaking and writing in something like Dutch.
When we 'did' Latin at school we spent the first year learning the 'rules' of grammar and sentence construction by applying them to English sentences. It proved to be very useful in later life.
Some years after school I did an evening class in Pascal programming - this too was a logical discipline which proved useful outside the narrow confines of computing.
Just one man's opinion, based on life experiences.
Latin is one of our main foundations. If it can't be taught in language lessons, then it should be taught in history. It wouldn't be a bad idea to teach our other languages as well, in history classes.
Of course, for that to succeed, there would have to be some will to teach something other than disjointed gobbets of fake history, which only tie in to the commercial aspirations of 'museums', where dressing up in synthetic materials is supposed to make you an 'Egyptian Pharoah'.
Give us back our language skills. Let us compete in a world which is leaving us all behind.
Final plea. Teach us to learn for ourselves and give us access to our own history. That is the point of education. Pity that so few people recognise it.
Latin GCSE today can be passed with an A* after a year of old fashioned conventional teaching of Latin. GCSE has been dumbed down so much that it's a fill in the missing word exercise, no unseens to translate from or into Latin, and no unseen poetry translation with the need to look at metre to see if some word is nominative or ablative... a complete travesty of a test of knowledge. Clever children excel at memorising lists and the fact that a Latin Primer contains pretty much all there is to know about Latin in a slim A6 volume of 150 pages says how little needs to be learnt to get a working knowledge.
Teaching of this can be fun if the teacher is enthusiastic. My 1960s Latin teacher remains one of the teachers who sticks in my memory because of his enthusiasm, old fashioned manners, ability to maintain discipline without resorting to sarcasm, and cheerfulness. I can still read the validictory monuments to the long dead in cathedrals and other places which were inscribed in Latin on the basis that every educated person knew it. Latin enables me to know the root meaning of words, spell them correctly and be a pedant when it comes to English grammar.
Other languages can be learnt the same way if they have grammar that must be mastered, including French, Spanish, German and Russian. Today's teaching of languages is shallow and does not equip someone with a GCSE after 4 or 5 years of study to read a newspaper, listen to a news bulletin and have a conversation in a foreign language - we expect foreigners to converse in English and few of us can do the same in their languages.
My children have their GCSE's with A*s and can't ask a waiter for a extra spoon in France because it wasn't in the list of phrases learnt, nor was spoon in the vocab. With my old GCE French the vocab and the grammar learned by rote is stuck in the memory and can be retrieved as required, along with subjunctives for conditional clauses, so necessary in France!
Well, if I am honest I remember the teacher hurling a piece of chalk at anyone not paying attention. It did not always hit it's intended target so anyone in vague line of fire might get hit.
The blackboard rubber, (which for anyone who isn't use to them is about the size of a clothes brush & made of wood too) was also hurled on more than one occasion.
Oh, you mean what Latin do I remember, "amo, amas amant" is about my limit, but then I did only stick with it for about 2 or 3 years!