The Importance of Latin in the Curriculum Essay -- Latin Language Educ

The Importance of Latin in the Curriculum My memories of Latin in high school are less than fond. I remember slouching in my chair, staring blankly at my desk as I tried to remember the form of the word agricola (farmer) in the ablative plural. Much of the class consisted of mundane activities like this. We translated endless Bible passages from Latin, translated what seemed like the entire body of Greek mythological literature, and read hundreds of lines from The Aneid, The Odyssey, and The Iliad. I signed up for Latin because I was considering going into medicine, and I had heard that doctors need to know Latin. As high school progressed, though, a medical career seemed less and less likely so it appeared I had no real use for Latin, except that I knew the meaning of phrases like carpe diem and semper ubi sub ubi (always wear underwear). When someone would ask me why I took Latin, I would either mumble something about how Latin is the foundation on which all modern languages are based, or I would laugh and agree w ith them that it was a waste of my time, and that it’s a dead language. And it is a dead language, at least in spoken form. Regardless of what Dan Quayle thinks, Latin is not the official language of Latin America. Latin has dropped from being the language spoken by almost the entire known Western world to an obscure language known mainly in scholarly circles. After the fall of the Roman Empire to Germanic invaders in 476 AD, Latin began a shift from being the common tongue to a language used mainly by upper-class and learned people (Hammond 243). Because the Church used Latin extensively, it became, along with ancient Greek, â€Å"the sheath in which the sword of the Spirit is lodged,† as Martin Luth... ...s managed to escape from the wrath of the approaching Greek army. Works Cited â€Å"Amo, Amas, Latin – How Schools Are Using the Ancient Tongue to Teach English.† Time 11 December, 2000: 61. Culham, Phyllis, and Edmunds, Lowell, ed. Classics: A Discipline and Profession In Crisis. Lanham: University Press of America, 1989. Davis, Sally. Latin in American Schools: Teaching the Ancient World. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Hammond, Mason. Latin: A Historical and Linguistic Handbook. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976. Kopff, E. Christian. The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition. Wilmington: ISI Books, 1999. Smith, Sharwood. On Teaching Classics. London, Henley and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. Waquet, Francoise. Latin Or The Empire Of A Sign. Trans. John Howe. New York: Verso, 2001