“Why do they have to learn French anyway?”
I was in my first teaching post and this was the question that frequently took me by surprise – not from the children – but from the parents. It was a school very different from the one I am in today. I would have thought the benefits of learning any modern foreign language were blatantly clear to all. Surely you don’t have to be a linguaphile to appreciate the advantage of being able to give your food order in the appropriate language in a foreign restaurant and you certainly don’t have to be gifted in languages to be successful in this basic exchange of information. However, these parents believed their children would never get to travel to France so there wasn’t much point. It seemed to be a very pessimistic view of their child’s future, even if they didn’t have the opportunity at that particular moment in time to travel abroad. The school was in Dover.
These days, I am more likely to be accosted with the question, “What’s the point of learning Latin? No one speaks it any more!” which seems to me to be a far more reasonable question and one that I was forced to ask myself when I started teaching it. What is the point? The likelihood of meeting a Roman soldier these days is, well, unlikely, and, unless you have an intellectual member of the family whom you wish to impress, the need to speak it is, let’s face it, non-existent. Which is why we don’t learn to speak it. The very first year I taught Latin in a primary school, the Head Girl stood up at Prize Giving and announced how much she enjoyed learning this ancient language, and her justification for this new-found love? You didn’t need to worry about how the words were pronounced because no one knew anyway! My initial joy that my subject was being mentioned at Prize Giving was quickly superseded by embarrassment – was that the message that I had managed to convey in the first term of teaching it? Was that the main reason to study it?
There are plenty of reasons for learning any ancient language, but I shall concentrate on Latin, mainly because it’s the only one I know!
If you’re hoping to impress someone with your astounding intellect then throwing Latin quotes at them is sure to succeed, after all, Latin is the language of the genius mind, is it not? Just imagine, someone hitting the depths of despair, they feel that they are lost in life, failing in everything and don’t know which way to turn. You can help with your famous uplifting quote, Carpe diem (seize the day)! Sure to cheer up any lost soul, especially if they’ve never heard it before and you can step in and educate them! Or if someone asks you what you think, rather than saying the obvious, a more obscure answer is sure to please, Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Philosophical as well. Finally, make sure you don’t go anywhere without the motto draco dormiens nunquam titillandus – so that you know not to tickle a dragon if you ever encounter a sleeping one (the Harry Potter motto in case you were wondering)!
While, as you may have guessed, I am not being entirely serious, I do think many schools (especially prep schools) actually believe that that is the reason for offering Latin and presenting it as part of their curriculum (no, not to avoid sleeping dragons) – to impress! Here are the real reasons:
- It helps children to learn more about their own language. The vocabulary is so close to English (obviously, as Latin is where we get much of our language) that pupils actually increase the vocabulary in their mother tongue as much as in the foreign one. By way of example, take the word dormio which means I sleep. Children can link it fairly easily to dormice and dormitories because they know what they are, but suddenly they can work out what words like dormant, dormient and dormancy mean. So too with mater (mother), pater (father) and so on ad infinitum (nearly).
- Children also get a better understanding of grammar. It’s difficult to grasp English grammar because it’s our mother tongue and we speak it instinctively. We don’t think about whether we’re using direct or indirect objects or what tense the verb is in unless we need to write with accuracy and then it becomes confusing. Learn it through another language however and you are not blinded by instinct – like eating with your eyes closed, you concentrate more on the flavour because there are no other distractions. Latin is better than most other languages taught in schools for this because of the range of grammar needed (parts of speech in particular).
- Many of our scientific words come from Latin. Year 6 pupils are delighted to learn that they can work out where the pulmonary artery goes (among others) just because the word pulmo means lung and then there’s that complicated periodic table, where the symbols are linked to the Latin rather than the English.
- It’s so much easier to learn other romance languages (Italian in particular, French, Spanish, Romanian, Portugese) when you know a little bit of Latin.
- As far as learning Latin at Prep School goes (as opposed to senior school), I think it is far less confusing than learning a second modern language. It is taught in very different ways precisely because it is not spoken and I have never known a child muddle up French and Latin, unlike with French and German or French and Spanish.
- It is learning for the sake of it, teaching to inspire a love of learning and if it’s taught well, it’s fun. Non scholae, sed vitae which, roughly translated, means “not for school, but for life”.
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Adventures at the chalk face 
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