Forget Mandarin. Latin is the key to success. This is the title of an article in the Spectator this month by Toby Young. The whole article is here.
For a while we ran the Minimus course in St Mary`s primary. I`d like to see it start up again. Here is an extract from the article:
...there is actually a substantial body of evidence that children who study Latin outperform their peers when it comes to reading, reading comprehension and vocabulary, as well as higher order thinking such as computation, concepts and problem solving.
For chapter and verse on this, I recommend a 1979 paper by an educationalist called Nancy Mavrogenes that appeared in the academic journal Phi Delta Kappan. Summarising one influential American study carried out in the state of Iowa, she writes:
“In 1971, more than 4,000 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade pupils of all backgrounds and abilities received 15 to 20 minutes of daily Latin instruction. The performance of the fifth-grade Latin pupils on the vocabulary test of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills was one full year higher than the performance of control pupils who had not studied Latin. Both the Latin group and the control group had been matched for similar backgrounds and abilities.”
Interestingly, Mavrogenes found that children from poor backgrounds particularly benefit from studying Latin. For a child with limited cultural reference points, becoming acquainted with Roman life and mythology opens up “new symbolic worlds”, enabling him or her “to grow as a personality, to live a richer life”. In addition, spoken Latin emphasises clear pronunciation, particularly of the endings of words, a useful corrective for many children born in inner cities. Finally, for children who have reading problems, Latin provides “experience in careful silent reading of the words that follow a consistent phonetic pattern.
For a while we ran the Minimus course in St Mary`s primary. I`d like to see it start up again. Here is an extract from the article:
...there is actually a substantial body of evidence that children who study Latin outperform their peers when it comes to reading, reading comprehension and vocabulary, as well as higher order thinking such as computation, concepts and problem solving.
For chapter and verse on this, I recommend a 1979 paper by an educationalist called Nancy Mavrogenes that appeared in the academic journal Phi Delta Kappan. Summarising one influential American study carried out in the state of Iowa, she writes:
“In 1971, more than 4,000 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade pupils of all backgrounds and abilities received 15 to 20 minutes of daily Latin instruction. The performance of the fifth-grade Latin pupils on the vocabulary test of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills was one full year higher than the performance of control pupils who had not studied Latin. Both the Latin group and the control group had been matched for similar backgrounds and abilities.”
Interestingly, Mavrogenes found that children from poor backgrounds particularly benefit from studying Latin. For a child with limited cultural reference points, becoming acquainted with Roman life and mythology opens up “new symbolic worlds”, enabling him or her “to grow as a personality, to live a richer life”. In addition, spoken Latin emphasises clear pronunciation, particularly of the endings of words, a useful corrective for many children born in inner cities. Finally, for children who have reading problems, Latin provides “experience in careful silent reading of the words that follow a consistent phonetic pattern.
10 comments:
I'm very glad to see Latin getting this well-deserved promotion.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
The shortage of postings on this subject might indicate either that all your readers agree with you, Father, or that they disagree. I rather incline to the latter.
Several people I know are quite good at Latin but otherwise they are not exceptional people; one or two are not especially good at their native language of English.
Latin, I do not dispute, has its merits. It is certainly useful for litugy and for those whose lives are dominated by religious matters - priests and bishops and contibutors to internet blogs come to mind - but for the 'man in the street' it can be but of little use. Far more useful are French, Spanish, Italian or German for those of us (the majority) who live in the present time and are occupied not only with our eternal salvation (quite rightly, of course) but also with our daily needs and duties: work, raising our families and concerning ourselves with the needs of others. Discuss!
Dear Trad Troll are you not persuaded by the arguments in the blogpost. Latin gives a useful starting point for all the Romance languages. From personal experince I can say that I didn`t understand what grammar was about in either English or French until I started learning Latin. Also the knowledge of classical civilization that comes with it is a good thing.
Dear Fr Brown, no!
Dear Fr Brown, no!
I like Latin laguage.
I even made my entry in Wikipedia in Latin.
Latin, of course, is still widely used in horticulture (possibly a little bastardised), and, contrary to much modernist belief, is still _the_ official language of the Church.
I'm not sure whether or not it's used in medicine these days - it was for many years.
Why?
My 'why' was in response to Dieter Phillippe, not to FrankE as it now appears. Why doe it appear like that when it was in its correct position before?
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