Is this the end of Latin in state schools?

[Edmontine]

Depressing news:

The Guardian

I don’t think I have used a single bit of any of my GCSE’s tbh aside from soft skills. I haven’t had much use of Pythagoras or my in depth analysis of the symbolism of candles in Great Expectations. Come to think of it I have never ever visited Germany in my life so that was a useless language to study!

Such few state schools offer it as a GCSE so by that logic it's already made those jobs inaccessible.

I actually have used a lot of what I learned at secondary school, if anything I thought it was more helpful than my IB.

To give your statement some some substance you could tell us what your discipline is?

Again, the amount of Latin you need for librarianship and archival curating, can be learnt while you are doing your 3rd level studies, You don’t need Latin to get into these courses

Other lawyers I know would disagree.

If you’d studied Latin you might know how to spell ‘amount’ as it comes from Latin ad montem via old French amont. Useful already.

Latin is the common root in many languages thus makes those languages easier. You can shift quite easily between Romance languages - French to Spanish to Italian.

You’re not going to have time to learn Latin while studying medicine. If you’ve done some already you can guess what an afferent vs efferent arteriole is likely to be, for example, and it’s easier to remember if you know why.

Mirabai · Today 17:00
LlynTegid · Today 16:58
More concerned because it is alongside the decline in MFL, to be honest.
I think that’s a fair point. The decline of foreign languages in this country is concerning.

Yes. Is that because the powers that be think A1 will make learning foreign languages redundant?
I will be very interested to see in 10 years how that has progressed.

But how many Romance languages do you think kids are learning or require?
Saying that you need to learn one language ( that is no longer used) in order to make it easier to learn other languages doesn’t make much sense when you could just learn the other languages instead.

I know many doctors who didn’t study Latin in school and learnt what they needed while they were doing their medical degree, the ammount of Latin doctors need these days is quite minimal

History - you need Latin (and to a decently high level) to do any academic period of history up until around the late 18th/early 19th century. You might not like it, but there it is. Same for most of English, nearly all of theology, Classics of course, ancient history and archaeology, anything that covers historical periods up to the late 18thc (or you simply won’t be able to read a lot of historical material). You’re ok that large parts of our history, literature, etc. become unreadable or unreachable by anyone who wasn’t at a private school?

The thing about Latin is that because it’s a language, obviously you can’t just get to A-level standard quickly later on - you need to build on it from its foundations, whereas people learn accounting or similar from scratch at a later age.

There are plenty of other school subjects that are far less useful. Schools still offer GCSEs and A-levels in sociology, psychology, media studies and so on even though they are taught ab initio at university. Come to think of it, the most absolutely useless school subject is one nearly all student take - English Language, which bears no relationship at all to any university language course and has no real value compared to English literature. Schools don’t even provide proper teaching for it. Yet I don’t see anyone complaining about that (or about sociology or history GCSE or Psychology A-level, for example). Latin actually teaches a core content that is rigorous, undeniably knowledge based, and important as as academic subject - whereas plenty of other school subjects aren’t.

Quite frankly, all the dismissal of Latin is is class envy. Because I don’t see any of those people proposing that we remove everything else from the school curriculum that isn’t “essential” or “relevant” or “important for today”. If we did, we’d junk sport, English literature, history, most of the social sciences, any languages, and anything that isn’t drearily instrumentalist or at all interesting for its own sake, and teach only touch-typing, accounting, coding, and marketing studies. Why not, if everything must be “relatable” and job-oriented?

Again, the amount of Latin you need for librarianship and archival curating, can be learnt while you are doing your 3rd level studies, You don’t need Latin to get into these courses

Simply wrong: could you learn Latin enough fluently to read an 18th century medical treatise, or an early modern pamphlet, or a medieval legal document, as part of a postgraduate course, to get to the same level as someone who’s been learning Latin since they were 11? Don’t make me laugh! You don’t really seem to know what these jobs involve!

You do realise that most official documents were written in Latin until quite late, and it was considered a lingua franca until very recently in European history? That major scientific works were written entirely in Latin? I guess state school kids are just considered not good enough to do the serious stuff, and should instead stick to doing the “relatable”, “modern” bits of knowledge.

I kind of disagree here, my mother is a historian and my dad is a philosophy academic, and neither of them have any Latin skills. My dad knows some classical Greek, but that's it!

You don’t need Latin in order to be accepted on a degree course to study History, English, theology, Classics, ancient history or archaeology, Latin is only a small part of those courses and will be learnt whilst you are studying for your degree

Putting it on the NC would put it on a level footing.Funding an infinitesimally small number of schools to do it is not putting it on an even footing or closing the gap.

Which periods do they work in? That’s the important thing - I bet your mother isn’t a medievalist or early modernist, for example, in that case. Lack of Latin makes earlier periods pretty much undoable. I myself couldn’t do early periods because I don’t have any Latin.

Philosophy is an interesting case - there are several radically different types of philosophy, which mean that some kinds are largely mathematical and do no history or original reading of texts at all. However, you would find it hard to be a Continental tradition philosopher without any of Latin, French or German and best to have all three.

She's definitely an early modernist, most of her research is on the expulsion of the Spanish Jewry as well as the Conquistadors.

Most documents are in old Castilian.

Relative teaches in a private school. Latin has already been deleted from the curriculum. Can’t afford the teaching staff. German is next on the hit list in this private school.

my ds went private - now left - but 2 subjects were also deleted there.

No, you’re not understanding - I’m talking about postgraduate work and academia in those disciplines. You would not need Latin for these at all at an undergraduate level (except for Classics, obviously).

But lack of it will skew what you can do higher up the discipline, and no, as a PhD student in English or History you can’t just suddenly learn Latin to the standard you need to be a medieval historian - it just isn’t plausible.

There are also pretty much zero facilities for teaching it during an academic course: you wouldn’t be able to learn it if you hadn’t done it at school. Where is it you think is offering undergrad English students the opportunity to learn Latin ab initio? Universities are making staff redundant, not putting on free GCSE courses!

If you don’t do Latin at school there really aren’t any opportunities to just learn it later. Where would these be?

I didn’t even know it was a thing in state schools.

This is a real shame. My son takes part in the Latin Excellence Programme at a state comp. He loves it, and generally does help with his wider learning.

His school only supports learning one language, so Latin was an added bonus (taken during an after school lesson) and would have been an additional GCSE for him, which he was really proud to be undertaking.

Okay, but that’s a disingenuous answer. She presumably needs to read old Castilian then; but Latin was the early modern lingua franca, and the language of the Catholic Church all over Europe, so she must need to have some materials in translation.

For the equivalent in English history you’d need Latin (as we obviously didn’t write materials in Castilian). And this rather proves my point. Did your mother study Spanish?

If we got rid of Spanish entirely from the state school curriculum, so that only private schools taught Spanish, how many state-educated early modernist historians of Spain would there be?

At my children’s school there are 3 Latin / Classics teachers. The classes at GCSE are full. It’s a popular subject.

My DDswere not offered Latin at their state school despite it being an outstanding school. They are now 20/24.

Are you joking? Most (ie over 90%) medical terms derive from Latin and Greek. You don’t need to have done any Latin to study medicine but it will make it much easier to learn medical terms - you can guess terms from the etymology.

It sounds to me like you don’t really understand the structure of language or you’d understand why Latin is so helpful. I speak 2 Romance languages + 1 other not including English. I can tell you it helped enormously.

My DM is a native Spanish speaker (which does help!) BUT as I know both Latin and Spanish I can say that Old Castilian is easy to understand Latin you'd get about 25%

When the youngest in our family was at prep school (more than a decade ago) the pupils used to go into a local state school to introduce those children to Latin …

And Castilian comes from Latin. Which she may well have learnt without Latin but it would have made it easier. Edit: Just seen she’s native Spanish so this is all rather disingenuous..