ONE ROAD TO ROME.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20898, 13 June 1931, Page 9 (Supplement)

ONE ROAD TO ROME.

- ~THE PRIMROSE PATH. All teachers, says Sir John Adams, in his preface to " Latin with Laughter, fall into the two great groups, the " Good old Grinders" and the "Primrose. Pathers." Whether this is so or not, i there is no doubt that Mrs. Frankenburg, the author of this little book, belongs emphatically to the second group. " She goes one better than her predecessors in the field of smoothing the way of the learner While these contented themselves with presenting Latin or French ' without tears,' she passes from the negative to the positive, and not only removes woe from the home schoolroom, but introduces actual enjoyment. To achieve this end, the sentences—which seven-year-old children learn to make by arranging words on cardboard slips, will turn grey—or greyer —the hair of the " good old grinder " for whom the achievements cf Balbus m wall building represent the extreme limit in linguistic vivacity. What, for instance, will they make of: " Why does the cow kick the'poet?" accompanied by a. sprightly illustration, or, in more poetical vein: " The nightingale is singing to the moon ? " Nor is " Latin with Laughter " merely a theoretical suggestion of a method by which the language may be introduced to infants. Mrs. Frankenburg has tried it with complete success on her own boys and girls, and her methods are commended by Professor Adams, as being thoroughly sound in the light of the most recent psychology. The author, in an illuminating preface, defends the " laughter" in the title. " Critics who may be inclined to deprecate the absurdity of most of the sentences and to complain that not, much substantial Latin is leamt when the book is finished, are reminded, on the theory that the ludicrous is more likely to stick in the child's memory than the commonplace—- ' whales sing' being therefore preferable to. ' ladies sing ' —first, that it is an essential part of the book to provoke laught'er, and secondly, that it is not a short cut to Latin scholarship, but an endeavour to help the inexperienced to prepare small children in a leisurely way for a discipline which, if met for the first time in the orthodox way at a preparatory school, will be to most of them, dull and disheartening," Perhaps then, through the gate of laughter, we may find for young feet a pleasant path to Rome, and prove that the Via Latina is not necessarily a Via Dolorosa. " Latin with Laughter," by Mrs. Sydney Frankenburg (Heinemann).