Reading Latin in Schools and Colleges

Years ago, when I began studying Latin, I did not intend to become a student of literature. Nevertheless, that is what happened, and my way of reading literature-any literature-is always informed by my interest and training in Latin and Greek. The same is, of course, not necessarily true either of all classicists (whose main interests may not be accurately described as "literary") or of all readers (who may not even know Latin or Greek)-and I try not to behave as if it should be! But there is no getting entirely away from the business of reading, and as both a teacher of classics and a teacher of literature, I have an enormous professional concern with how students are taught to read. In my own experience, viewed in hindsight, the apparent progression from the study of Latin and Greek as languages (which, of course, never actually concludes) to the study of Latin and Greek as literature looks so natural as to appear inevitable. It is, however, anything but, and for me or anyone involved in running an educational program at any level to assume otherwise would be a big mistake. That is a relatively simple point. A more subtle one, perhaps, is this: our professional failure to take this point seriously helps to explain some of the disjunctions that exist between high school and undergraduate classics programs, including the perplexing tendency of students with strong high school classics backgrounds not to continue these studies in their college and university careers. Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Classics This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/121 READING LATIN IN SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES Years ago, when I began studying Latin, I did not intend to become a student of literature. Nevertheless, that is what happened, and my way of reading literature-any literature-is always informed by my interest and training in Latin and Greek. The same is, of course, not necessarily true either of all classicists (whose main interests may not be accurately described as "literary") or of all readers (who may not even know Latin or Greek)-and I try not to behave as if it should be! But there is no getting entirely away from the business of reading, and as both a teacher of classics and a teacher of literature, I have an enormous professional concern with how students are taught to read. In my own experience, viewed in hindsight, the apparent progression from the study of Latin and Greek as languages (which, of course, never actually concludes) to the study of Latin and Greek as literature looks so natural as to appear inevitable. It is, however, anything but, and for me or anyone involved in running an educational program at any level to assume otherwise would be a big mistake. That is a relatively simple point. A more subtle one, perhaps, is this: our professional failure to take this point seriously helps to explain some of the disjunctions that exist between high school and undergraduate classics programs, including the perplexing tendency of students with strong high school classics backgrounds not to continue these studies in their college and university careers. To illustrate the point, let us consider how Latin literature is studied, first from the perspective of a high school student, then from that of an undergraduate. In secondary schools, Latin is taught by and large as a foreign language rather than as literature. The traditional elementary sequence of grammar, Caesar, and Cicero reveals an almost antiliterary perspective. Caesar obliges students with a repetitive style and affords excellent opportunities to drill the ablative absolute, indirect discourse, and other characteristically Latinate constructions. Cicero is read for purity of diction, correctness of grammar, and a pronounced tendency towards fulsome elaboration of the hypotactic complexities possible in a highly inflected language. Neither author produced the kind of literature that teenagers would read anyway if it were up to them (as if!). Both can be and are read in colleges and universities in some surprisingly unexpected literary ways; but to my knowledge, readings of gendered space in the Gallic Wars have yet to find their way into many secondary school curricula. Only in the later years do high school students really begin to read Latin as literature, which in practice means reading poetry; but even then linguistic competence is still emphasized much more than literary competence. High school Latin is, in this respect, not so very different from French, German, or Spanish. The purpose of studying a foreign language, especially in the early years, is to teach systematic, logical thinking, to develop the memory, to sharpen the student's ability to under-