What do we want from Latin in high school?

Here is another brief (I hope) piece inspired (if that’s the word) by a recent conversation with a fellow Latin teacher. In an attempt to discuss methodology, I thought it might be worthwhile to discuss the presumed end result of five or six years of Latin in high school. Now in The Netherlands there is a centrally coordinated exam, identical for all the students of a given subject in the country, comparable to, but of course different from, the dreaded AP exams in the US. So The Exam is generally considered the most important thing, as a satisfactory result overall gives you access to university (with this particular kind of high school diploma, known in The Netherlands as “vwo”).

But thankfully, some enlightened colleagues do agree that one does not educate students only to pass the exam. My own view is even more liberal: teach the kids a language, Latin for example, properly and the exam shouldn’t be a big deal at all. You do it in passing, so to speak (no pun intended).

So the question is, beyond passing the exam, what does a Latin teacher want for his students after five or six arduous years of study?

“Well,” said this colleague, “it depends. For example, this other colleague hopes that students will become readers.” (Implied, I’m quite sure, is ‘of books in Dutch’.) “I myself,” the colleague continued, “want them to learn to think logically.”

This is no doubt connected to this teacher’s believe in teaching from a grammar point of view, implying that you can not even read a Latin sentence in the order the writer wrote it in (see my recent piece about this on this blog).

I find this so funny, because both views are, to me, so clearly about side effects at best. Hello! Just imagine an English or French or German teacher in The Netherlands saying something similar! Clearly, colleagues in those languages will tell you something like, Well, I’d like my students to be able to follow university classes taught in English (in The Netherlands, for example). Or, I would like them to be able to watch a German police movie without subtitles. Or, Look, I’m quite happy if they can work their way through ordering a meal in a French restaurant. But I mean, something about the actual use of the language.

What should it be in Latin? Being able to translate fifty words of Cicero at a rate of one word per minute? Being able to read a poem by Catullus you’ve studied in class before with a facing translation? Being able to recognize an occasional expression or word from Latin that Dutch has appropriated? In my view, none of these are good enough for five, six years of hard work.

My own take is that being able to read at sight and more or less in real time a passage from, say, the Vulgate or Eutropius would already be something. But, to be honest, I think with a serious change in methodology, the aim can be higher. Reading an average poem or fragment by Ovid at sight, with notes for my part, or perhaps a Latin prose paraphrase. Reading Vergil with the help of a Latin prose paraphrase. A colloquium by Erasmus with some vocabulary help (in Latin).  And how about being able to write a paragraph or two in Latin in response to, say, a Caesar, a Pliny, a Sallust?

In any event, the vast majority (my guess is well over 99 %) of the students who sit for the Latin exam here (and the same is true for the AP exam in the US) never ever look at Latin again in their life. That, it seems to me, is an unacceptable net result of five or six years of study, and that’s putting it mildly.