A few weeks ago, the Martin Center ran an article by Megan Zogby in which she questioned the utility of college foreign-language requirements. In today’s article, Professor Lee Jones replies that while little good seems to come from making students take a couple of courses in Spanish or French or some other language, colleges would do students a favor by requiring Latin.
Jones writes, “If I were the ‘decider,’ I would require more than two years of Latin, beginning far sooner than postsecondary education. College may be too late for any but the most gifted or dedicated to acquire spoken or written fluency in a language. Spoken fluency is hardly the point with a dead language, however, and college is definitely not too late for a student to gain the many other benefits that come from even beginning to study Latin.”
If students learned Latin, that would improve their vocabularies and understanding of our grammar, he argues. A knowledge of Latin would also benefit students who go on into fields such as medicine and law.
I applaud Professor Jones’s idea, but studying Latin is hard. There are wrong answers. It hardly lends itself to “woke” activism. That is to say, there’s almost nothing in it that would appeal to today’s students.