Latin lovers go back to school
Classics nearly disappeared from the classroom. It’s now so popular that parents are joining their children for lessons, says Daisy Dunn
‘Mothers, fathers – and a grandmother – claim the children’s seats in the classroom’
At Colfe’s School, an independent day school in south-east London, something strange, and rather wonderful, has happened. The parents are so excited by the Latin their children are learning that they’re now going back to school – to learn the language themselves.
Every Monday evening for the past ten weeks, a group of parents has been meeting to complete a course for Latin beginners and intermediates. No sooner have the children left the building, than their mothers, fathers – and, in one case, grandmother – claim their seats in the classroom.
In the last lesson of term, the parentpupils are reading extracts from Virgil’s Aeneid. On each desk is a textbook, Latin to GCSE. At the front of the classroom is the textbook’s co-author – their enthusiastic, 30-year-old teacher, Henry Cullen. As the students read about Aeneas’s travels across the Aegean, Cullen produces a map of Greece, along with pictures of the holy island of Delos, on an interactive whiteboard screen. The class learns to translate not only Virgil’s words, but also to identify the places Aeneas visited. It is as if they are seeing the sites through Aeneas’s eyes.
‘Having all these lovely stories to translate, and the illustrations and history, brings the subject to life,’ says Dawn Oliver, 74, whose granddaughter is also studying Latin at Colfe’s. ‘I did Latin to A Level, then became a lawyer and didn’t think about it for around 56 years.’
‘These classes have helped a lot, and I’ve bought myself a little anthology of extracts from Virgil and so on, and I’m taking a bit at a time. I’m enjoying it. It’s something I can work at when I’ve got an hour with nothing else to do.’
Latin lessons have changed considerably since Dawn Oliver left Notting Hill and Ealing High School in 1960. There has been a shift away from rote-learning verbs and declensions, and a move towards studying the language in the broader context of antiquity. The students in Mr Cullen’s class compare the words for numbers in Latin with those in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek and Sanskrit: ‘Unus, un, uno, uno, eins, eis, eka...’ The similarities remind them that all these languages share an IndoEuropean root.
Sceptics may mourn the relative lack of grammar in today’s lessons, but Latin might not have survived on the school curriculum at all had changes not been made to teaching methods. In 1960, the year Dawn Oliver left school, Latin ceased to be compulsory both at O Level and for entry to Oxbridge. The message that dreary old Latin had had its day was only compounded by its exclusion from the list of ‘core’ subjects ring-fenced by the National Curriculum in 1989. Uptake of the subject in schools fell dramatically: 7,901 pupils sat Latin A Level in 1965; only 1,237 in 2000.
Today, the numbers are slowly recovering. Approximately 12,000 take Latin at GCSE and 1,300 at A Level. The resurgence owes much to the wellrounded nature of the lessons. At schools such as Colfe’s, where Latin is compulsory for all 12- and 13-year-olds, the opportunity to engage with an ancient culture is often an incentive to study the language. Pupils can no longer grumble, as the essayist Thomas De Quincey did, that their Latin books cause ‘more human suffering than Nero, Robespierre, or any other enemy of the human race’. And, if they need some encouragement in learning a few Latin conjugations by heart, they can now turn to their parents.
‘When I joined this class, I had completely forgotten the imperfect tense but, as soon as I saw a ‘-bam’ ending, I had bam, bas, bat, bamus, batis, bant in my head – I have no idea where it came from,’ says Dominic Egan, a parent who last studied Latin at grammar school in the 1970s. ‘Earlier today, as an experiment, I tried to teach my son the four conjugations in the present tense – and he got it just like that.’
Although the parents have been skipping through the subject more quickly than their children – ‘We’ve been a little less thorough,’ says Henry Cullen – their lessons have provided an opportunity for bonding. Grace Ba, a Latin beginner, has found that the experience has enabled her to understand the challenges her daughter faces in her Latin lessons. ‘Mandarin is our first language. To use a second language to learn another is hard, so I wanted her to know, “Mum’s doing the same thing as you!”’
Whether they are learning Latin out of intrinsic interest, to inspire their children, or ‘Just to have a different conversation with people’, as Liz Simpson, a mother of two, explains, the challenge is to keep it up. There are plans to offer a new beginner’s course at Colfe’s next academic year, which will also be open to the parents of pupils at local comprehensive schools. And the hope is that courses such as these can gather their own momentum elsewhere.
Parents who have read classics at university might start teaching Latin classes for beginners or intermediates at other schools. If the idea takes off, who knows where it could end up?
Three years from now, teenagers may arrive at school to find their parents not just in the classroom, but in the examination hall, too.