That £4m on Latin lessons should be spent on a modern foreign language

[newnortherner111]

www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/latin-state-schools-england-williamson-b1894202.html

Latest idea from the Education Secretary. Given that the Prime Minister has been in a Catholic church at least once, did he not tell Gavin Williamson that the Catholic Mass is usually in the local language now, and has been for over 50 years?

Encouraging learning Spanish for example would be much better and actually have a use in real life.

@Odisia

I did Latin at secondary school for 3 years. It's stood me in great stead when learning other European languages.

Same here.

Latin is the root of all European languages so has benefits in terms of understanding the linguistic principles underpinning all languages.

I did French, German and Latin at the same time and learned Spanish later. All three of my initial languages helped me learn linguistic principles. Latin only helped me with the others in the sense that you learn tons of grammar even pretty early on, because grammar and vocabulary are all you need to make time for in Latin - no lesson time devoted to listening, speaking etc! But it is not necessary to learn Latin to learn grammar when you could instead give more time to MFL and teach it better! Incidentally, it is my French that has made it massively easy for me to learn Spanish, not my Latin.

Teaching Latin for its own merits is all well and good, but I think its benefits as an aid to learning other languages are wildly overstated and kind of an illogical arse-about-face principle.

I didn't learn Latin at school. I did learn French, German and Spanish and got the same result everyone here is claiming Latin gave them, being able to engage with most European languages, with the added bonus of language skills I could immediately use.

@Anycrispsleft

I'd be very surprised if you couldn't get the same perspective and language learning skills from learning a modern language. And with modern languages there's also the massive advantage of having access to newspapers, film, TV, and to native speakers.

Exactly, I'm with you @Anycrispsleft

Rather than wasting years on a language nobody speaks, because it makes learning other languages easier, why not spend those years becoming proficient in a languages you can actually speak to people and learning about countries you can actually visit and experience the culture?

The main reason Britain struggles with MFL is because we start far too late. Teaching 11 year olds Latin is not suddenly going to make them better at learning French and Spanish. Introducing foreign languages at a young age, infant school or even nursery is proven to make it easier to learn other languages later on. By secondary school age your brain has already lost a huge amount of ability to learn to pronounce new sounds.

Other countries know this and teach MFL as a priority from very young. Hence why in some countries eg Netherlands it is not uncommon for people, even those with no higher education, to speak English, French and German fairly fluently.

I know several children aged 3-5 who speak 3 languages because it is relatively effortless at that age to pick it up. It gets so much harder the older you get.

He has just dropped in this culture war bullshit to make sure that people are talking about this and not the fact that he has just scrapped level 3 BTECs.

Plus the fact that language education includes cultural education, learning Latin will not give you any knowledge of the current globe.

Latin is useful for law and medicine. My chemistry teacher had studied Latin and said it really helped him with his chemistry degree…,spanish probably would be less useful to him. My best friend is a lawyer and uses Latin terms daily.

bonbonours I 100% agree with your post. MFL should start to be taught in primary school until age 16, only then would it be possible for kids to leave school with a decent ability to speak a foreign language. A couple of hours a week for three years in secondary was all we had at our school. Having studied foreign languages further as an adult, I realise that this is nowhere near enough.

@BashfulClam

Latin is useful for law and medicine. My chemistry teacher had studied Latin and said it really helped him with his chemistry degree…,spanish probably would be less useful to him. My best friend is a lawyer and uses Latin terms daily.

The majority of kids at my comp were never going to go on to be scientists or lawyers, that's just the way it is. I think it would have been fine as an option for those who wanted it, making it a compulsory subject would be ridiculous.

Exactly, PedalPushers. I'd genuinely like to understand how, for example, starting Latin and French simultaneously at age 11 (or probably starting some French in primary school, then starting Latin in secondary) provides any kind of Latin 'springboard' to learning French or Spanish.

1. Children need to be taught English grammar properly and sensibly from primary school and continuing into secondary school. An understanding of the grammar of their own language is absolutely key to being able to start learning a foreign language properly.

2. The MFL curriculum and methodology need a complete overhaul. There needs to be continuity between primary and secondary, plus a budget for qualified MFL teachers to teach in primary schools. It's ridiculous that it's compulsory to teach a modern language at KS2 in England, but that there is no primary MFL training or a proper curriculum! MFL are treated as low priority by the government, schools, parents and pupils. Adding Latin is going to do nothing whatsoever to help with that, and if it takes curriculum time away from MFL it will make matters worse.

The main reason Britain struggles with MFL is because we start far too late.

It is taught in primary schools, just badly and with no continuity. It's often just the primary class teacher slinging them whatever bits of French he/she remembers from school.

lazylinguist I agree with your post. When I was at school teaching English Grammar was not in vogue, and this meant that when I was taught Grammar in French or German I had no idea what was going on. I think it's absolutely shocking that we never learned English Grammar, really put my generation at a disadvantage. I didn't even know what any of the terminology meant. It's really not possible to learn a foreign language without understanding what grammatical terms are referring to, not as an adult at least. I don't know how different things are now.

The current cohort who just left year 11 were the first to do the new SATs with the controversial and much hated new Spelling and Grammar paper. Whatever criticisms one might have of the nitty gritty of what's in the paper, there's no doubt in my mind that having year 7 pupils arrive in secondary MFL lessons actually knowing what an adjective and a noun are, and understanding a bit about tenses, is a massive improvement. It's hard when you have to spend your French lessons explaining how English works first .

It's rather strange to assume that Latin could only be useful if you go to an old-style Catholic mass. It is useful for all the reasons people have cited here. Why should we deprive state school pupils of the opportunity?

The MFL curriculum and methodology need a complete overhaul. There needs to be continuity between primary and secondary, plus a budget for qualified MFL teachers to teach in primary schools. It's ridiculous that it's compulsory to teach a modern language at KS2 in England, but that there is no primary MFL training or a proper curriculum!

You can’t make continuity between primary and secondary when your average secondary has kids from around 30 feeder schools. It’s not practical. It is perfectly possible to do a primary PGCE with an MFL specialism. Better funding would help, but teachers want full timetables, not a couple of afternoons a week. Lots of free schemes of work out there, as well as paid for schemes.

I did Latin at school for one of my GCSEs, first and last year to be offered it, absolutely bloody loved it! Wish I'd pursued it to be honest (not sure in what capacity though!)

Latin is the subject that has proved most useful to me outside of school in understanding English. Unlike the other languages we were forced to learn.

Spanish is taught in my dd comp anyways

@Stoolpigeon21

www.clc.cambridgescp.com/sites/www.cambridgescp.com/files/legacy_root_files/singles/expall2/expnew.html?fn=ets1uk0&mn=1627759994

For anyone who feels like nostalgic for Cambridge Latin. I am absurdly pleased to have scored 10/10 on the vocabulary test.

My new theory for the Government’s plan to reintroduce Latin, is that Gavin Williamson is friends with the CEO of the publishers of the Cambridge Latin course and this is a means of redirecting Government funds to one of his cronies.

Honestly, I've never studied Latin in my life and I could make sense of most of this, because so many of the roots of these words have made their way into English, French or Spanish. As a result, not really convinced why learning Latin is necessary for gaining better skills with other languages or for the other applications people are making claims about.

Rather than wasting years on a language nobody speaks, because it makes learning other languages easier, why not spend those years becoming proficient in a languages you can actually speak to people and learning about countries you can actually visit and experience the culture?

I find this a bit depressing. I mean, it's fine to learn a language because you want to speak to people and "experience the culture" (although, to be honest, I find that phrase pretty wanky), but it's not the only reason to learn a language. It's equally valid to learn a language to read literary works in their original form, to gain a greater understanding of language in general, or to understand more about history. I've learned several dead languages and a good number of modern foreign languages. I prefer the dead ones and I think the seemingly endless years I spent learning French were far more wasted than the time I spent learning Latin. Each to their own.

MFL teaching in schools was appalling when I was at school (00s). It's shit that it seems to be so poorly funded and devalued by recent governments, but that seems to be par for the course these days. It shouldn't have to be one or the other, there should be decent provision for both Latin and MFL - but that's not likely to happen any time soon.

I don't think it should be an either/or situation, I would have actually loved to learn Latin at school, but I think MFL should be prioritised.

I did an MFL degree, and whilst reading the news recently, found out that my old university is planning to scrap the specialised language classes that MFL students take, and only teach them at the less intensive language centre instead. Looking into it further, it seems (many?) other universities are scrapping language departments altogether So I don't see the point in teaching Latin 'because it helps you learn other languages' when the opportunities to learn those other languages are being cut. And this is all against the background of Brexit, scrapping Erasmus, and and getting rid of EU Freedom of Movement for British people (which was also kind of useful if you wanted to learn a language).

@lazylinguist - it's definitely not being taught in all primary schools. My children have been to three. In their first, there was no MFL taught at all (but you could pay for a lunchtime Spanish club run by an external franchise business).
Their second school taught French to years 5&6 only (mixed age group class). Over the year my daughter was in this class, it involved two introductory 'lessons' eating croissants and other French foods from Lidl, a lesson in which a French musician came in and sang some songs in French (which meant nothing to the kids because at this point they'd still not been taught anything beyond 'bonjour' and 'bon appétit') and three lessons in which the children did some random worksheets printed from Twinkl (complete with spelling errors). They then stopped at October half term because there was too much to do for the Christmas production. In the spring and summer terms, there was no work completed in her French book and she doesn't remember having any lessons either.
At their third (current) school, they do French from year 3-6 with a specialist teacher BUT it's an hour a fortnight for half a term (so 3 lessons), then half a term off etc. There is no progression and they have learnt very little as they forget so much between lessons and only have about 9-10 lessons a year. The feeder secondary does Spanish anyway so they start from scratch again in year 7.

@lazylinguist you've saved me a lot of typing! I learned the same 3 languages in school. Have learned Spanish, and one of the Nordic languages since. I enjoyed Roman mythology, but have never found the language to be of use.

I'd not heard about this but it's the best idea an education secretary has put forward for decades.

A better language to spend the money on would be BSL.