Photo: A new book edited by Richard LaFleur, head of UGA's classics department, is the first comprehensive methodology and resource guide for Latin teachers in decades. Photo by Rick O'Quinn.
By Phil Williams
In the early years of the 20th century, Latin was routinely taught in U.S. schools. Indeed, it was the standard language studied by liberal arts college students for more than two centuries. But in the 1960s Latin's bust in the language hall of fame began to crumble.
Educators questioned Latin's relevance. Students wanted to speak a living language.
But a funny thing happened to Latin on its way to extinction: It rose from its grave and, deus ex machina, helped resurrect a new interest in classical studies. Today there are more than 10,000 teachers of Latin in America's schools and colleges.
A new book edited by Richard LaFleur, head of UGA's classics department, is the first comprehensive resource guide for Latin teachers in decades. Latin for the 21st Century: From Concept to Classroom may help keep the language alive for many decades to come. Authors include scholars and teachers from many of America's top programs.
"This book aims to help train teachers at all levels," says LaFleur. "There has been a steady resurgence of Latin at all levels since the late 1970s."
After declining rapidly from the early '60s through the mid-'70s, says LaFleur, college Latin has grown and stabilized. High school enrollments have increased nearly 25 percent over the past two decades, and middle-school enrollments have tripled since the early 1980s.
Latin's revitalization after its disastrous plunge in popularity could partly be cyclic. The language was condemned in the '60s as worse than irrelevant, as "a throwback to medieval education," writes Kenneth Kitchell Jr. of Louisiana State University in the first chapter.
Classicists began a counteroffensive, however, pointing out that atin students had better vocabularies, along with better studying and thinking skills. They argued that Latin was not just for the elite. Indeed, the way back was led in part by several extremely successful Latin programs in inner-city schools.
In reflecting on Latin's decline and resurgence, Kitchell points to "one of the great lessons from antiquity--that there are cycles in human events and that, as Ecclesiastes put it so well, Nihil sub sole novum."
There may well be nothing new under the sun, but Latin for the 21st Century includes information on innovative teaching tools that were inconceivable even a generation ago, much less in the days when Latin was still a living language.
Latin, of course, is no longer the ultimate required course, as it was through the 19th century in American colleges. Still, appreciation for the subject has rebounded, and LaFleur hopes the new volume will help both neophyte and veteran teachers keep a very old language alive.
