CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 85, 11 April 1945, Page 4

CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

LATIN in schools To the Editor The gentleman who compiled the, new Latin syllabus forbidding "grammar" and enjoining "fluency" probably has an affection for our modern New Zealand dialect and fears that too much Latin grammar might spoil it For example, if you hear a young man or a pretty girl say, "Them two blokes as come there Satiddy was dees," be assured that you are in the presence of the.real thing, a genuine, full-blood, nativeborn New Zealander, product of our primary system, "free, compulsory and secular." Now this manner o'f speaking, with its magnificent unconsciousness of the rules of grammar, has most respectable, and, indeed, heroic associations. It passed from lip to lip at El Alamein; Gallipoli and the Low Countries knew it well in 1917; in 1935 it put the Labour Government into power. We should all love it. But it could never grow and flourish in the withering dry winds of Latin grammar. Honour and applause to him who would exclude grammar from our schools! As to fluency in Latin, again, applause! I have been studying Latin, man and boy, for over 40 years, and the Almighty has not yet granted me fluency. To think that a schoolboy should acquire this priceless gift! It would certainly be useful to him. Of course, he could not read Virgil or Horace fluently, for they can only be read as they were composed—. slowly, line upon line, with .. due thought upon the value of each word. But, then, who wants to read them? Horace, with his famous "I hate the common crowd," is distinctly undemocratic; and as for Virgil, he is hopelessly unscientific. He did not even understand the internal combustion engine. Imagine his Icarus flying over the Alps in a contraption of wax and feathers! The amazing thing about the classics is that they have endured two thousand years. Some people think they will endure another two thousand—long after our educationists are forgotten. But I put my money on the "profanum vulgus." Some day it will find out what is being done to it, and will turn and rend those who would deny it polite education. FERGUS DUNLOP.