The unexpected benefits of learning Latin for children
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.
Image: Flickr
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
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
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.
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)]
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!)
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