The unexpected benefits of learning Latin for children
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Latin Specialist Teacher Isobel Monaghan during a lesson at Sompting Abbotts Preparatory School. Ms Monaghan is a polyglot (she speaks six languages, including Russian). Read more about Ms Monaghan here.
Research shows that learning Latin leads to children scoring higher in other curriculum areas.
Latin studies help improve children's overall school performance because it ...
- Lifts academic outcomes in other subjects
- Assists understanding of mathematical concepts
- Strengthens English literacy skills
- Facilitates learning another language
- Provides exposure to ancient history and cosmology
- Prepares pupils for scientific, legal or medical careers
- Equips a child for coding and computer programming
- Rewards students with a CV and UCAS application boost
Expelliarmus! (‘I disarm you!’)
Children have much to thank JK Rowling and her fabulous Harry Potter books for.
Aside from her wonderful storytelling and world steeped in dazzling magic is the fact that JK Rowling – who studied French and Classics at Exeter – is helping to make Latin ‘cool’ again.
The Harry Potter books are chock-full with Latin, right from Hogwarts’ colourful motto Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus (‘Never tickle a sleeping dragon’) to the wand-wielding spells and incantations such as Expelliarmus! (‘I disarm you!’) and Petrificus Totalus! (‘I turn you to stone!’).
The characters, too, are awash with Latin colour. For starters, there’s Albus (meaning ‘white’ or ‘bright’) Dumbledore; Severus (meaning ‘severe’) Snape and Bellatrix (the feminine form of bellator, the Latin word for ‘warrior’) Lestrange.
The roots of Latin in Britain begin with the Roman Conquest. Image: Wikimedia
Is Latin a dead language?
Latin is certainly not a dead language. It is invisibly and indelibly thread through modern-day English.
A significant proportion of English vocabulary is Latin-derived. English is in fact a ‘hybrid’ language, a marriage of two languages – English and Latin.
This is, in part, due to the Roman conquest of Britain and ensuing Norman influence in British history. A further factor is that for centuries, throughout Europe, education included the two classical languages of Latin and Ancient Greek.
In etymology (the study of historical linguistic change), English is a 'Germanic' language. It’s derived from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors who invaded our shores from the 5th to 7th centuries).
Nonetheless, over 60% of English words have Greek or Latin roots and in the vocabulary of the sciences and technology, that figure rises to over 90%.
Many Latin phrases, we still use per se: a Latin phrase meaning 'by itself'. When we tell the time, we make it clear it is morning or evening with am or pm. These represent ante meridiem: before midday and post meridiem: after midday.
How often do you say: ‘That’s a bit of a non sequitur” (‘That doesn’t follow’)? Or “He went on ad nauseum” (‘To the point of nausea’)?
Should children still learn Latin today?
Some parents have reservations about their child learning Latin. Their hesitations usually are: “What use will Latin be to their careers?” and “Isn’t it a waste of their time?”
You may feel your child would be better off learning Mandarin. They may – if they aspire to work in China one day.
But the attention to detail and powers of deduction that learning Latin requires means that it is not exactly like learning any other language.
It is for this reason that a large body of evidence points to the fact that children who study Latin gain an advantage in multiple other academic areas that are applicable to a wide range of careers.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, studied Classics and regards Latin as one of the keys to his success. Image: Wikimedia
How many children learn Latin at school?
Sadly, not enough now get the opportunity. Recent statistics[1] show that 4% of state primary schools offer Latin lessons.
West Sussex County Council figures show that only 8 West Sussex state secondary schools offered GCSE Latin in 2018 and only 2 state schools offered the subject at A Level. No West Sussex state primary schools offer Latin as a curriculum option.
More independent schools offer the subject at primary stage. IAPS figures show that 567 preparatory schools[2] nationwide currently provide Latin classes.12.9% of UK state secondary schools[3] offer Latin, compared with 59.9% of independent secondary schools.
Many universities offer Classical and Latin Studies, with Cambridge, Oxford, Durham, St Andrews and Exeter topping the league tables for the subject.
The 2014 Primary National Curriculum made learning a foreign language compulsory at Key Stage 2 (Years 3 to 6). State schools are free to choose whether to teach an ancient or a modern language. However, prevailing policy has tended to view Latin as ‘anachronistic’.
Successive governments have taken a utilitarian approach to language teaching in schools. Modern languages like French, Spanish and German are more frequently offered for their perceived more ‘practical’ value.
There has been a revival in Latin teaching, however, both in the US and the UK in the last few years. In the US, it is being lead by the Classical Education Movement[4] and in the UK by the Iris Project.[5]
The Iris Project is bringing Latin and Classics back to rural and inner-city primary and secondary state schools. Since 2006,it has been running free Latin courses on the school curriculum at KS2 for state primary schools across the cities of London and Oxford. Its Literacy through Latin scheme aims to use Latin to boost literacy and linguistics skills in deprived urban regions.
The project founder, Lorna Robinson, is a former Classics teacher at Wellington College. Through a partnership with the charity Classics for All, which has won a grant to train 70 Latin and Classics teachers in primary and secondary schools, her Iris Project is aiming to bring classics to 1,000 state schools[6] in the UK over the next 10 years.[7]
Year 7 pupils during a Latin lesson at Sompting Abbotts Preparatory School
8 reasons why learning Latin is good for children
1. Learning Latin lifts academic outcomes
Latin study is likely to have academic benefits for your child across the board.
These stretch beyond mere language learning because it has been shown that mastering Latin can help children perform well academically in other subject areas.
Research indicates that studying Latin raises standardised test results because children’s verbal, analytic and problem-solving skills are stretched when they learn Latin.
The evidence comes from a US series of studies. These compared the academic results of Latin students to those of children learning French, Spanish and German. For the study, more than 4,000 pupils from Years 5, 6 and 7 received 15 to 20 minutes of daily Latin instruction for one school year.
The Latin group and the control group were matched for similar backgrounds and abilities. The result? The Latin students consistently surpassed the test scores of every other group.
Significantly, this trend did not just happen in one single year. The study was repeated across seven years. Each year, the Latin students outperformed the other learners.
2. Learning Latin helps increase Maths scores
What is interesting about the study is that it wasn’t only the children’s literacy scores that were lifted (they were ahead of their peers by one year). It concluded: “The students … advanced nine months in their Maths problem-solving abilities.”
If that surprises you, note that Mathematics is also a ‘language’. A logical one that, like Latin, requires attention to systems, detail and thinking in an orderly manner.
The vocabulary of Maths (especially Advanced Maths) draws from many different alphabets and includes symbols unique to Maths.
It appears that because Latin grammatical structure has much in common with the structure of mathematical logic, learning Latin may have knock-on benefits in Maths.
About 80% of the entries in any English dictionary are borrowed, mainly from Latin. Over 60% of all English words have Greek or Latin roots.
3. Learning Latin strengthens literacy skills in English
Latin helps children with their grasp of basic grammar and syntax. It also builds their vocabulary.
Consider the words ‘contemporary’ and ‘temporary’. Both words come from the Latin root temp, which means ‘time’. Or ambi from the Latin root ‘both’ which gives rise to ambiguous and ambidextrous.
Or dict from the Latin root ‘to say’ which has given us dictate, dictator and contradict. Even contra in that last example comes from the Latin root meaning ‘against’!
Teaching ‘root’ words like these assists children to ‘decodify’ the English language. Children come to see it as something they can reason through.
A single Latin root can generate over 100 words. So 10 roots can give a child more than 1,000 words they can decrypt on their own.
Learning these word patterns improves children’s ability to gain meaning from unfamiliar words and helps them with their reading comprehension.
The benefits children learning Latin receive include a superior understanding of English grammar. They can grasp grammar concepts that often confound even older language learners.
They’ll know, for example, how to use ‘who, whose, and whom’ properly. Even young Latin learners get to know the difference between the nominative, genitive, and accusative cases of the relative pronoun.
“Learning Latin is a brilliant way to support children’s literacy. It helps children make connections between Latin and English grammar and vocabulary, and gives them the key to unlock English.”
4. Learning Latin makes grasping another language easier
Studying Latin provides the foundation for learning other modern foreign languages – even German or Russian.
This is because in learning Latin, children become comfortable with breaking down grammatical structures and parts of speech.
This is even more relevant if they’re going on to study a Romance language such as Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, or Romanian. These languages derive more than 80% of words from Latin and most of their structure, grammar and lexicon come from Latin.
Once your child has understood the concepts of agreement, inflected nouns, conjugated verbs, and grammatical gender in Latin, they’re better equipped with the building blocks to learn another language.
Apollo and Daphne by Antonio Pollaiuolo, one tale of transformation in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Image: Wikimedia
5. Latin teaches children about Ancient History
Learning Latin and the Classics opens children’s eyes to the wonders of classical civilisation and gives them new cultural reference points..
Many schools teach Latin through the vehicle of history and literary texts of the ancient world. Examples are Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Caesar’s Gallic Wars.
Our culture is a direct descendant of the ancient world. These stories provide priceless insight into daily and multicultural life of the Roman Empire whose influence was so important to British history.
Giving children the opportunity to read world famous authors, leaders, and history-makers in their original format means they’re able to better understand the literature, theatre, art, and music that have been inspired by classical authors such as Shakespeare, Pope, Tennyson, Swift and many more (including JK Rowling!).
So they’ll have deeper insight and be ‘better read’ than many of their peers in life ahead.
Illustration from Minimus, a Latin course for younger children published by Cambridge University Press. Courtesy of Helen Forte, illustrator of the Minimus books.
6. Latin prepares children for scientific, legal or medical careers
Might your child one day work in a scientific field or become a doctor, nurse or lawyer? Knowing Latin will help them fast track in those professions. It will also make their studies easier for them.
Until only recently, Latin and Greek were required subjects for medical students in the UK. They still are in some countries. This is for good reason. Medical terminology comes almost entirely from these languages.
Dr. Charles Zubrod was an American oncologist who played a prominent role in the introduction of chemotherapy for cancer. When asked what had best prepared him for a life of medical research, he replied: “Studying Latin and Greek as a child.”
Latin supplies many of the root words for the specialised vocabularies of the modern sciences. It is also the language of law, politics, logic, and theology. Indeed, all legal terms come from Latin. The study of logic also comes to us from Latin translations of Aristotle’s work from the medieval period.
The first task in learning any new subject is to learn the vocabulary. The child who has learned Latin is already half way there.
The decryption and deduction skills that children learn through Latin are applicable to computer programming.
7. Latin develops a child for computer programming
Many of our children are likely to work in tech fields such as computer science in the future.
Every lesson, Latin is a code that needs to be decoded. Once a child knows the technique, they've acquired a useful transferable skill because translating a Latin sentence can be compared to breaking a code or assembling a jigsaw.
Since computer programming uses its own set of languages, its rules are a lot easier to understand with a Latin background. A child who has already learned through Latin to work out core meanings, identify patterns and think of solutions has got a clear head start.
Current coding languages such as Python and Javascript will probably not be the ‘hot’ languages in a decade.
But whatever the coding languages are in the next 10 years, having had to organise your thoughts in Latin – a language in which you can't just start a sentence and improvise – will be a useful asset for any future coder.
The deductive reasoning required to learn and understand this highly inflected language serves to foster clear, logical thinking – a vital ability for a computer scientist.
Students who can list Latin on their UCAS application or CV are seen to be critical thinkers.
8. Learning Latin gives a CV and UCAS application boost
The benefits of Latin do not go unnoticed by employers and universities who know that Latin challenges students to think critically. So if your child has studied the subject, he or she is likely to stand out.
University admissions have evidence that he or she has probably more potential to excel in their courses. Having chosen Latin also shows that the student or candidate may well have both stronger analytical skills and world knowledge than one without.
Only a student who has mastered abstract thinking and learned the value of hard work will make it past the first level of Latin. So having Latin on their CV or UCAS application could well be what makes a difference to your child in the future.
That’s whether they want to study or work in the field of languages, science, computer programming medicine, law – or anything else.
Ergo (therefore!)
Are you still wondering if your child should study Latin?
Our advice is not to view the subject in the same way you would another modern foreign language.
Its payback benefit may well be much greater. Learning Latin is an exercise of the intellect that helps stretch and develop the brains of children. The more they learn of Latin, the better they may well be at many other subjects.
What is certain is that the best thing we can do for our children is to encourage them to think critically. To succeed in an increasingly complex workplace, they’ll need flexible minds that can readily absorb new information and respond to complex problems.
![Photo credit: Daniel Ogren [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/596b4aa7b8a79b10f857f3c4/1574679182186-7GWEZ39167UMJGR7ZQVO/jk+rowling+believes+in+the+usefulness+of+learning+Latin+and+the+Classics)
Photo credit: Daniel Ogren [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
JK Rowling recommends Latin's "ancient wisdom"
The author "ditched German", her original subject choice, to study French and Classics at Exeter University.
"I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom," she told students at Harvard when she received her honorary degree.
Perhaps the final word should go to Ed Clarke, the International Association of Preparatory Schools (IAPS) Classics Advisor and author of Variatio: A Scholarship Latin Course.
"Latin is the best way of strengthening a mind known to man. Translating it into English is not dissimilar to cracking a code, with clever detective work needed to find each piece of the puzzle," he says.
"By mastering Latin, you can be certain of having a first-rate brain."
Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am!)
Latin Learning at Sompting Abbotts
At Sompting Abbotts, we believe the study of Latin and Classical Civilisation is of benefit to every child. Classics and Latin Studies are offered from Years 6, 7 and 8. Most destination senior schools for our pupils also offer Latin as an option at GCSE and A-Level.
References
[1] https://www.theschoolrun.com/cool-classics-latin-and-ancient-greek-primary-school
[2] https://iaps.uk/
[3] www.cambridgescp.com/files/legacy_root_files/downloads/Access_to_Latin.pdf
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_education_movement
http://irisproject.org.uk/index.php/literacy-through-latin
[6] https://www.ft.com/content/906272e6-fe60-11df-845b-00144feab49a
[7} http://irisproject.org.uk/index.php/the-iris-project/projects/capital-classics/8-projects
Author: Sarah Monaghan
