Bill Bradford: Why did high school offer classes in Latin?

Published 11:47 am Thursday, February 25, 2010

bradfordPaul started his freshman year of high school late. He’d been sickly for three years with a sinus infection which kept him out of school since the beginning of seventh grade. After six surgical operations in two different hospitals and outpatient treatments too numerous to count, he had begun seventh grade again in a small town in Vermont.

But by this time Paul was 14 years of age, which is somewhat of an advanced age to be taking seventh grade with other children who were 11 or 12 years old.

Paul’s mathematics teacher was a Mr. Shaw. Mr. Shaw thought Paul was capable of doing school work at some level beyond seventh grade, so he talked with the school principal about offering Paul testing to help with appropriate school placement. Paul accepted the offer and took the tests. After the achievement tests were evaluated, Paul was offered the opportunity to skip both seventh grade and eighth grade and join students who had begun ninth grade or, as we call it, the freshman class in high school.

At that point in time I was enrolled in English, civics, world history and agriculture classes.

For you see, my middle name is “Paul.”

But even then, I was perplexed by questions about curriculum.

Who made the decisions as to what studies were appropriate or relevant to the challenges of later adult living? Why did that high school offer two years of Latin language courses?
And later in college, I wondered why was I required to take several courses in a foreign language as a condition for graduation with a baccalaureate degree.

Some answers to these questions came to me as a student in college. I had enrolled in a course called “History and Philosophy of Education.”

Our practices in higher education have been greatly influenced by the practices of the Middle Ages. In those days the university curriculum consisted of the liberal arts: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music.

Studies in Latin, Greek and philosophy were also included in the university curriculum.
The person graduated by the university was regarded as being prepared to function effectively in any adult life role.

Any training in crafts, trades or mechanical skills was regarded by the scholastics as lower-level learning and greatly below the value of a liberal education.

Training in applied skills was left to the guilds or unions of tradesmen. To this day there is a tension in some universities between applied sciences and liberal studies.

There is at least one county in Michigan where there is great emphasis within the secondary school system on practical education. High school graduates may have qualified as nurse aides, phlebotomists (skilled in drawing blood), auto mechanics, cosmetologists, computer programmers or in one of several other occupations.

Many of the high school graduates are ready and able to find paying jobs when they receive their high school diploma.

One of my friends said to me yesterday, “In high school they should teach how to balance a check book, change oil in the car, use credit with caution, do a family budget and manage their health.” Parse Latin verbs?

Maybe for some of us, but surely not for the many!