From Llcohee@aol.com Sun Sep 9 05:08:49 2001 Received: from mxu102.u.washington.edu (mxu102.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.15]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f89C8l078678 for ; Sun, 9 Sep 2001 05:08:48 -0700 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by mxu102.u.washington.edu (8.11.6+UW01.08/8.11.6+UW01.08) with SMTP id f89C8lE30563 for ; Sun, 9 Sep 2001 05:08:47 -0700 Received: FROM imo-d09.mx.aol.com BY mxu2.u.washington.edu ; Sun Sep 09 05:08:47 2001 -0700 Received: from Llcohee@aol.com by imo-d09.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v31_r1.4.) id d.31.1a692592 (26116) for ; Sun, 9 Sep 2001 08:08:44 -0400 (EDT) From: Llcohee@aol.com Message-ID: <31.1a692592.28ccb5cc@aol.com> Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2001 08:08:44 EDT Subject: a secondary teacher's reply to CMS To: classics@u.washington.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 5.0 for Mac sub 39 In a message dated 9/8/01 10:59:26 PM, cmschroe@umich.edu writes: << Two hundred thousand high school Latin students seems to me to be quite a large number! [snip] As OC pointed out, it was an elite ordeal for the very sake of its rigor. I think that it is also important to remember in any discussion of percentages, enrollments, etc. that one hundred or even seventy-five years ago there was simply a lot less known about the world in which we live, and consequently, a lot less to learn outside of the world of Classics. It is much easier to demand that someone learn Latin when they don't have to learn about science, technology, etc. >> >From Diane Ravitch, *Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms* (2000), p. 351: "In 1934, nearly 900,000 students were studying a modern foreign language, and some 700,000 were taking Latin; by 1955, the number enrolled in a modern foreign language was unchanged (even though the student population had soared), and the number taking Latin had dropped to 454,000." Ravitch makes it quite clear throughout her book (now in a paperback edition with a change of title: *Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform*) that Latin in American high school programs was *not* any kind of elite ordeal, a passport to college or university for a fortunate few. Rather, as the Classicists on the Committee of Ten of 1893 envisioned it, Latin was a core subject of a Western democratic education of high quality, an experience which all students, regardless of their socio-economic status or future plans, would share and be firmly bound by. True, it was the Committee's paper which urged the elimination of Latin as a qualification for college entrance. But again Ravitch demonstrates that at the times of highest Latin enrollments in American high schools, most students were not intending to go beyond high school. Their parents, especially recent immigrants, wanted their children to have an education that would allow them to participate fully in the nation's life. The "Cardinal Pri ncipals of Secondary Education," published in 1918, did far more damage. Its framers, the NEA's Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE) were socialist progressive doctors of education in whose view most young people, particularly children of recent immigrants from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, were intellectually incapable of learning, say, Latin. Since such children were destined for the trades anyway, they asserted, let's prepare them for life in the factories and the domestic arts. Real education was for a few; for the bulk of America's youth, job training and life adjustment skills were more fitting. We now refer to these as "science and technology" and too readily admit their greater importance in the life of the individual or the nation. This means that we have relinquished our curricula to business and industry. Chris Kopff is right: we have given up any high idea of education and giggle at the very notion of Classics as the core of such an education. We have low expectations of ourselves, our students, and our discipline. Of course there were even larger social forces at work. The nationalism that erupted in World War I also brought about a significant drop in the number of European dissertations and classics journal articles written in Latin, even though classical scholars at that time were conversant, even fluent, in written and spoken Latin. To refuse to share the fruits of one's research with all by writing in Latin was--and still is--a political act, not to mention an overt statement of one's own belief in the uselessness of Latin. As I tell my teaching colleagues, our task is to teach the Classics in such a way that our present students, 20 or 25 years hence, will strongly urge their own children to take Latin or Greek in school because it was the richest, most meaningful subject they ever learned, a relief from the grim utilitarianism that otherwise prevails, the subject that still helps them make sense of their lives. That, and because they remember their Latin teacher/s with admiration and fondness as skillful, wise, and passionate human beings in whom they could see living evidence of the worth of the Classics. Peter Cohee Boston Latin School .