Nadine, Lindy asked me to not post but when I see cruelty to children being advocated I will protest: <Best thing you can do for any child's English is to force him to take a few years of Latin and Greek. >
They used to try to tell us that too. It is false. The best thing you can do for learning English is to learn English.
In my day, one reason children did better by taking Latin [Greek was not in the curriculum] was that they were placed with brighter children with better teachers. I refused to do Latin so was put with those of lower academic ability. When I joined up with the Latin students a couple of years later I was amazed at how much more they had learned than we had. We were put in the slow lane.
Our son studied Latin because Auckland Grammar School was still in 19th century mode at the time, caning recalcitrant boys [that was in 1990, not the 19th century]. If they are capable, they go in the higher classes which have Latin as part of the deal.
He wanted to study Japanese and generally do well, so Latin [for only one year fortunately] was part of the process.
If there is any research that shows "Those studying Latin do better at English" it is because those studying Latin are more intelligent than the others and get better teachers and have greater academic aspirations. Also, the people who study languages, and are excited by definitions of past participles, futures pluperfect and infinitive conjunctions are not inclined to scientific ideas such as "correlation is not causation". If students of Latin do better at English, that does NOT show that studying Latin makes them better at English.
Also, the idea of "force" in learning is silly. Yes, you can force a horse to water, but you can't make them think, [Stockholm Syndrome aside]. Onehunga High School tried to force me to learn history and a criminal thug called Robi, who was probably a concentration camp Nazi who escaped from Europe now I think about it, threatened to cane me if I didn't get in the top 10 of social studies [in which I used to try to get last while still answering some questions - it used to amaze me how difficult it was to come last]. Lists of dates and events in English history and who was king in 1066 seemed totally irrelevant to my life, so I refused to learn them and neither did I care what Vasco da Gama had for breakfast during the Peloponnesian wars. I still don't care.
He did teach me something important though, which was the danger of authoritarians having power over people, the cruelty of sadists and the mindlessness of education which is largely Stockholm Syndrome boot camp, training people to be compliant and to love Big Brother.
It's more important to find out what young people are interested in and provide them a means to learn what they want to do. Forcing all children into intellectual boot camp to learn Latin, Greek, English history and Shakespearian sonnets is stupid. There is more to the world than pluperfect odes in Greek, translated to Latin, converted to Shakespearian Englische and interpreted in the 21st century.
The best way to learn English is to use it from a young age with people who use it well, and to have available interesting books [preferably Donald Duck comics, Asterix etc], movies and other things which use English.
But English is an anachronism and needs metricating. Pounds shillings pence, farthings, drams bushels, inches, miles, furlongs, gallons, pecks, acres, fahrenheit, slugs, poundals etc have been evicted. Making English rational would be good. Perhaps linguists could amuse themselves with that instead of inflicting Greek and Latin on the innocent.
Mqurice |
