Earlier in American history, did all children learn Latin?

[HappyGrace]

At what age did they start and how long did they continue? Any links to such info?

 

We're rolling right along through LFC A, and I'm convinced of the benefits of Latin, but it does feel like it takes precious time that we need for other things right now.

 

I'd love to see what our forefathers' generations studied as far as Latin. I know their education in general was much more rigorous. It's going very, very well, but even with very diligent work on mine and dd's part, it seems like the classical method is taking an inordinate amount of time in our house so I'm thinking of cutting out Latin for now.

[LadyAberlin]

I don't know the answer to your question, but my history prof in college said that when she was in school everyone took latin. She told me that in early 2000 and she had to be in her 60's or 70's. I don't think my grandmother took latin. I should ask her. She went to a small country school. My prof grew up in a large city and I don't know if she went to public or private school.

[SonshineLearner]

I believe that students had extensive Latin knowledge, which is how English grammar was learned, and also greek and I think maybe Hebrew and you were to learn to be fluent in at least the Latin and Greek before starting the University at ....14??

Carrie:-)

PS, I'm going to order the 2nd edition of LCC, I've already read the 1st edition and I'm going to go this direction with my 5 year old. My 5th grader has gone another direction but at least she's going through Henle 1 right now which is according to schedule...She doesn't want to do Greek, so I'm not sure that I'll make her...

[LizzyBee]

I don't know for sure, but I have a hard time believing that rural kids who attended school for maybe six months of the year (and through 8th grade at most) learned Latin. My dad, born in 1918, didn't.

 

I remember reading an excerpt from something Churchill wrote. He wasn't considered smart enough to take Latin in primary school, so he couldn't take it until either high school or university; I don't remember which. He wrote about how well he learned the English language before taking Latin, and he felt that actually worked to his advantage.

[ElizabethB]

As Geraldine L. Rodgers says in her article "Why Noah Webster's Way Was the Right Way," (http://www.donpotter.net/PDF/WHY%20NOAH%20WEBSTER%20WAS%20RIGHT.pdf)

 

"The teaching of beginning reading remained unchanged until the eighteenth century A. D. Children first learned the alphabet, and then learned the syllabary, but they continued to spell each syllable as it was practiced, using the current letter names (which still did little to demonstrate their sounds: ell, oh, gee = log). It was only after they learned the syllabary that they read connected texts, usually Latin prayers after about 300 A. D. They then read those texts syllable by syllable until they became proficient readers.

 

Until the sixteenth century A. D. in English-speaking countries, beginning reading was taught in Latin, and, in much of Europe, beginning reading continued to be taught in Latin until the eighteenth century. Since beginning reader did not yet know Latin, obviously they were reading print purely by its “sound”, and not by its “meaning” (such as Pa - ter nos - ter for Our Father.)"

 

Latin was still taught for a while after that, for different lengths in different countries. My public high school dropped Latin just a few years before I started attending there.

 

from page 167 of Rodgers' History of Beginning Reading:

 

"The switch from Latin to the vernacular to teach beginners to read marked the end of Latin as a common tongue for Western civilization. The sixteenth century humanists made a sincere attempt to repair the damage to spoken Latin which had occurred in the degenerate late Middle Ages, but they did so with “improved” Latin grammars like Lily’s, which sometimes used the vernacular to teach largely WRITTEN Latin, instead of the ancient Latin Donat which had been used to teach largely SPOKEN Latin, even though boys were then encouraged to speak in Latin in the grammar schools of the sixteenth century. It is true that Latin grammar schools persisted widely into the middle nineteenth century, and some probably persist in many areas today, but it was not spoken Latin which was ultimately learned in these schools, but a written, dead language. For all ordinary purposes except in the Church liturgy, Latin died out as a living, spoken tongue about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, it therefore largely died out as a written tongue also not long afterwards."

 

Geraldine E. Rodgers' "History of Beginning Reading" is very interesting. The e-version from Author House is fairly inexpensive.

Edited December 27, 2008 by ElizabethB

[momsquared]

All the Catholic schools in my area required the students to study it at the secondary level. I think in that case it probably tapered off when the Church stopped having mass in Latin.

[laughing lioness]

None of my grandparents went past 6th grade. Only one grandma took Latin and she was at a Catholic boarding school for awhile. They grew up in Chicago, MO or northern IN -very rural at the time. I would have to say that they were all highly educated individuals.

[kalanamak]

My mother, who was born in 1917 in CA didn't. My father who was born in 1909 in Kansas had to buck and balk to NOT take Latin when he got to high school (he told them he was going to be a chicken farmer and chickens don't understand Latin....he later told me he couldn't even apply to Harvard as he didn't have 4 years of Latin). My sister, born in 1939 in Kansas had several years as elective, and learned it very well, got a good scholarship and when she met the private school girls there, her latin (and general education) was better than the prep schools girls.

 

By the time I got to the same school system my sister went to there was not a peep about Latin anywhere.

 

BTW, both my parents used the McGuffey Readers.

[PeterPan]

It's not a question of if, but WHEN, in my mind. And yes, I've been feeling the same thing. Cut the latin and focus on the basics. It will be there to come back to later.

[Guest Alte Veste Academy]

I don't know for sure, but I have a hard time believing that rural kids who attended school for maybe six months of the year (and through 8th grade at most) learned Latin. My dad, born in 1918, didn't.

 

Yes, I agree that it would be hard to believe. I can imagine that kids were learning Latin at the more formal and private schools in big cities. I think it was probably as much about location and teacher qualifications in the rural areas as anything else.

 

I took Latin in the 9th grade at a public high school in Huntsville, AL in 1987 but when we moved to Texas for my 10th grade year, it wasn't offered at my new high school. Of course, the AL school had all kinds of things the TX school didn't have, including sororities and fraternities! :001_huh:

 

Kristina

[G5052]

In colonial days, most of the more well-off were educated by tutors at home or sent away to England, and yes, that type of student almost always learned Latin. Where communities determined to have a school and hired a schoolmaster, some of them taught Latin, and some did not. The quality of these schools really varied.

 

Then during industrialization, there was more emphasis on public schools to educate workers, and some just focused on the basic 3 R's and some provided a more diverse curriculum including Latin. Private schools for the rich and Catholic schools tended to teach Latin.

 

My grandmother went to college and taught in a one-room schoolhouse in the Southwest in the 1920's and she never learned Latin. She was the only college-educated woman in town, and was very disappointed that none of the teachers her children had in K-12 had college degrees. No foreign languages were taught at all in the schools in their town, and both my mother and aunt credit my grandmother for teaching them what they needed to succeed in college.

 

My father grew up in urban areas of California and Oregon and Latin was a required course in the public school from 7th grade and up in the 1940's.

 

From what I've read, the starting age for learning Latin really varied. Some taught it along with reading from the beginning, and some waited until later. There's some evidence that starting a child on a second language when they're younger has it's benefits, so that's what we do. I am teaching them verbal Spanish and written Latin.

[plimsoll]

I would recommend reading LCC is you have not already done so. You may also want to read Climbing Parnassus by Tracy Lee Simmons.

 

We used LfC for a while and then switched to Lively Latin. LfC was good but a little dry for us. Lively Latin has history, Roman culture, English vocabulary and English grammar mixed in with the Latin lessons.

 

There are four subjects we try to do every school day: math, Latin, writing and music. In addition we do a mix of fiction and non-fiction reading every day, including weekends.

 

Additional subjects that we cover (not every day) include history, science, geography, literature, mythology, poetry, Greek, vocabulary, word roots, grammar, Judeo-Christian tradition and art.

Edited December 27, 2008 by plimsoll

[dragons in the flower bed]

At what age did they start and how long did they continue? Any links to such info?

 

There was no universal curriculum before the early 1800s. Most children learned arithmetic, but even that was not guaranteed. Sometimes they just unschooled it and jumped right in with higher maths when a kid was 10 or 12.

 

I'd love to see what our forefathers' generations studied as far as Latin. I know their education in general was much more rigorous. It's going very, very well, but even with very diligent work on mine and dd's part, it seems like the classical method is taking an inordinate amount of time in our house so I'm thinking of cutting out Latin for now.

 

What else are you doing? Have you replaced English with Latin, or added Latin on?

 

The method we moderns use takes longer to learn by than the methods our forefathers used, that's for sure. Plaid Dad's blog just had a brief piece on the Hamiltonian method but I can not seem to link directly to it because it does not have a title. It's currently a couple of posts down.

 

Here's the curriculum of The Boston Latin School in 1712.

[HappyGrace]

Thanks for the input so far. I own LCC and love it, but we belong to a heavily academic co-op so that is our core. I have given up English this year for Latin, and we really don't even do a spelling program this year either, just cross-curricular spelling. She LOVES the history though, and we are getting WAY too heavy in that area, but it's all tied together so well. She is actually thriving and studies hard all day by her choice-she is literally like a sponge that cannot get enough of the humanities, but I feel like we're missing out on some basics and also just some of the things I wanted to homeschool for, like hanging out reading on the couch. She wants to do it all herself, and we're missing out on the "discussion" aspect of classical.

 

So really, there's a lot going on with this that I'm trying to sort through-just thought maybe dropping the Latin for now might free up some time. I'd love to see some schedules of early school days when they got a rigorous education (including Latin!) so I can see how to fit it all in!

 

Keep it comin'-I'm checking out all the great links! Thank you!

[Penelope]

My grandmother grew up in a rural area and in the 1930's, several years of Latin were required for graduation from her high school. Most kids in that area were farming families, and many only went through 8th grade, and graduating from high school was a big deal then. My great-grandparents were immigrants, so I don't know about before then. By the 1960's when my mom graduated from the same high school, they had to have a foreign language but it was Spanish or French.

 

I don't know about my other grandparents. I do remember them reciting poetry; my grandfather in particular knew a lot of long poems by heart, required in school when he was a young boy in the 20's.

[Donna A.]

This has been an interesting thread! :lurk5:

[hsmamainva]

My parents are both deceased, but here's a little bit about both of their academic backgrounds.

 

My father was born in 1918 and raised in rural Kentucky. He attended a one-room schoolhouse (and his mother, my grandmother, was the teacher!). He attended school several months per year (when there wasn't work to do on the farm) and he 'graduated' in 8th grade. Yet my father was able to help me with my algebra and geometry homework when I was in high school! He never studied Latin.

 

My mother was born in 1923 and graduated from an all-girls private high school and she was required to take Latin all 4 years. I remember finding her yearbook and her best friend had written, "Latin is a dead language, that's plain enough to see. First it killed off all the Romans, and now it's killing me!" And I remember thinking that saying was just hysterical when I was a kid! :D

[Karenciavo]

The oldest continuously operating public school in the US is the Boston Latin School. I have a book title Old-Time Schools and School-books and in it you can read a brief history of public schools in the colonies and early US history.

[dragons in the flower bed]

I'd love to see some schedules of early school days when they got a rigorous education (including Latin!) so I can see how to fit it all in!

 

Keep it comin'-I'm checking out all the great links! Thank you!

 

Did you know that Cheever's Accidence is available online? If you download it looking for schedules in a foreword, you'll be disappointed.

 

Here's a history of high schools that includes a blip of light into the daily schedule.

 

I'm pretty sure they didn't fit it all in. They just taught Latin and arithmetic and a religious catechism.

Edited December 27, 2008 by dragons in the flower bed

[HappyGrace]

Thank you!!

[SonshineLearner]

Wow, have you all looked at the Boston Latin School's reading list, including summer...and everything else? Is your life that much grander if you read it ALL? I want my child to be knowledgeable and wise AND still like life.

Hmmmm....

Carrie:-)

[dragons in the flower bed]

Wow, have you all looked at the Boston Latin School's reading list, including summer...and everything else? Is your life that much grander if you read it ALL? I want my child to be knowledgeable and wise AND still like life.

 

They don't ask that kids read them all.

 

If I were going into the tenth grade at the Boston Latin School, I'd pick the Ursula LeGuin and the Isaac Asimov books for my two required reports from the relevant list, because those would be the ones I would have read for fun anyway.