Making the Old Cool Again

This is one of the most popular posts on the NY Times site today: A Dead Language That’s Very Much Alive. It’s about the study of Latin, which is making a resurgence. According to the article, Latin was once rejected as outdated or irrelevant, but evidently it’s now exploding in popularity. Teachers are in high demand, and kids are tying it in with history.

Enrollment in Latin classes here in this Westchester County suburb has increased by nearly one-third since 2006, to 187 of the district’s 10,500 students, and the two middle schools in town are starting an ancient-cultures club in which students will explore the lives of Romans, Greeks and others.

The article also says:

Marty Abbott, education director of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, said it was possible that Latin would edge out German as the third most popular language taught in schools, behind Spanish and French, when the preliminary results of an enrollment survey are released next year. In the last survey, covering enrollment in 2000, Latin placed fourth. “In people’s minds, it’s coming back,” she said. “But it’s always been there. It’s just that we continue to see interest in it.”

I think this is awesome news. I knew kids who studied Latin in school. One kid had this joke, “I speak a dead language. Let’s talk!” And then he’d pretend he was dead. I always wondered why they studied a language that had no obvious application in the real world, but I think the article hits it right on–you can better understand history and culture by knowing how people communicated back then. Latin, like Greek, is a language that served as a foundation to Western culture.

This is cool too:

In Scarsdale, N.Y., where Latin enrollment rose by 14 percent to 80 this year, the high school sponsors a Roman banquet on the Ides of March during which students come wearing tunics and wreaths in their hair. Seniors serve bread, olives, roasted chicken and grapes to younger students, and all of them break bread with their hands. Dr. Marion Polsky, the Latin teacher, said that former students still send her postcards written in Latin and that at least three have gone on to become Latin teachers.

Not to hijack the Latin party, but since this is an Asian American blog, let’s hijack the Latin party–the stereotypes of Asian languages and Asian culture depict our foundations as old, traditional, and no-longer relevant. It’s the same Kipling-esque story that we see in Western literature of the strong West rescuing the weak East. Now if it’s possible to make something old like Latin cool, could the same be done for Asian languages and cultures? Just a thought. Maybe this could be helpful to educators.

Returning to Latin, I think it’s great. There is a lot of wisdom in the old texts that gets lost in translation. With more kids learning Latin, it’ll ensure that this wisdom continues to flow from one generation to the next.

Making stuff