Technicolor Latin

When the anthropologist father of one of my former students shared an article with me titled "Why Students Of Color Don't Take Latin," I was immediately intrigued.  

The author of the article is John Bracey, "one of few people on the planet who can call themselves both black and a Latin teacher," and he makes two points with which I completely agree.  He states, "We must resist the temptation to use standardized test scores, such as the Latin AP exam, as a mark of program quality."  No one of reasonable intellect thinks that test scores are the measure of anything other than the number of questions students answered correctly, and I have written about this here and here and here.

Mr. Bracey also advocates for hiring more Latin teachers of color.  "[W]e need to train and hire more teachers of color. Department chairs and their Latin teachers can start by reaching out to local colleges and universities inquiring about Classics majors of color who might be interested in becoming Latin teachers. Make it known that your school is actively looking to increase diversity and views this as a real priority. Also, if you are fortunate enough to have a qualified applicant of color for a Latin position at your school, hire them! If you are not the one doing the hiring, make sure that your admins know that you have a strong interest in adding a teacher of color to your team. Ultimately, we won’t make significant progress in this area unless we start attracting and retaining students of color in secondary and post-secondary programs."

He is right in this, but it is increasingly difficult to attract anyone of any color into teaching, and with poverty afflicting American Indian/Alaska Native and Black/African American citizens the most harshly, it is reasonable for those who do escape its clutches to want more than a public teacher's salary.  Still, I join him in his call for more Latin teachers of color, for he is right when he answers his students' questions about the reason for taking Latin by saying, "I tell them that it is a beautiful language that unlocks a world of wonder. From the ancient Romans to the modern day, Latin has been an international language of art, music, science, math, law, government, medicine and everything in between. Whatever the student’s passion is, Latin will definitely help."  If seeing teachers that look like them and share their experiences helps even one student claim the intellectual and cultural wealth that is no longer strictly Greco-Roman but has passed into the human treasury, riches that are that student's birthright as a human being, then every effort should be made to make that happen.

Where I would disagree with Mr. Bracey is regarding what that effort should include.  He asks, "[W]hy don’t more students of color sign up for Latin in middle or high school?"  This is, of course, an important question to ask, although completely different from what is implied in the article's title, which suggests that students of color do not take Latin at all.  This is patently false as the more than thirty percent of the Latin students at my school of nearly 4,000, where Latin is the third largest in enrollment of seven languages, will attest.  It can only be assumed that Eidolon chose a provocative, if misleading, title for Mr. Bracey's article to garner attention.

Still, the question Mr. Bracey asks is important, but I disagree with his claim that pedagogy is a contributing factor.  He writes, "Unfortunately, far too many Latin programs have embraced exclusivity rather than seeking to counteract it. Often this takes the form of making pedagogical choices that advantage a select few students and disadvantage the rest.  [C]ertain practices have and will continue to create exclusive programs, regardless of intent."

The pedagogical approach he finds problematic is the grammar-translation method that "generally consists of learning grammar rules, learning grammar terminology, memorizing paradigms, and translating Latin into English primarily to demonstrate grammatical accuracy."  The first part of this definition is fair enough, but that its goal is "primarily to demonstrate grammatical accuracy" through translation is not.  While some instructors may make this the summum bonum of grammar-translation classroom, it need not be the case.  As I recently wrote, and published several years ago, there are many artistic and creative explorations that go far beyond mere grammatical accuracy and that should form the basis of a rich language classroom.

With this slanted understanding of what the grammar-translation classroom can be, Mr. Bracey continues.  "The challenge that the grammar-translation approach poses to inclusivity is that it takes language, something universally accessible to all, and creates a series of unnecessary and onerous roadblocks that render it accessible to only the few. For example, using a comprehension-based approach, with no direct grammar instruction, all of my 7th grade students were able to read novice-level chapter books in Latin by the end of the year. With a grammar-based approach, those same results would be considered totally invalid unless accompanied by the ability to decline mixed-declension adjective-noun pairings, or to identify the difference between ablative of means and an ablative of manner."

It is unclear why the grammar-translation approach is "accessible to only the few," and the article never explains this.  Is the approach one that only the brains of people with certain physical traits can comprehend?  This would seem to be the logic behind such a statement, but that is surely not what Mr. Bracey intended.  Still, pressing on from this curious statement, he suggests that the teacher who uses the grammar-translation approach would invalidate the achievement of students in one area if they were not successful in another.  This, too, is perplexing.  The G-T teacher may well expect students to identify a particular ablative use, but their failure to do so would not prompt that teacher to discount their other achievements.  Surely a teacher would not claim students knew nothing about the labors of Hercules if they simply mislabeled the lion as being from Lerna and the hydra from Nemea, yet beautifully retold the myth in a modern setting.

At this point Mr. Bracey's argument seems a bit slanted and confusing, but it takes an egregious turn when he proclaims, "Grammar-translation and its demands have served as something akin to voter I.D. laws in the United States.  Insisting that Latin students have a solid understanding of Latin grammar also seems harmless, but it can result in limiting access to students of color in the name of providing skills that are not necessary."

Again, it is unclear why students of color should be limited by a solid understanding of grammar.  Mr. Bracey himself possesses such an understanding.  Is he an exception?  Yet one of the strongest refutations of such a claim is the 1st century A.D. Roman rhetorician Quintilian, who wrote, "Nomina declinare et verba in primis pueri sciant:  neque enim aliter pervenire ad intellectum sequentium possunt."  "Let boys especially know how to decline nouns and verbs, for otherwise they cannot come to understand what follows."  (Institutio Oratoria I.4.22)

The grammar-translation method has stood the test of time because of its effectiveness.  Students typically begin their Latin studies rather late in life, in their early to middle teen years  While some teachers have undoubtedly made of it a thing of pedagogical abuse, this can be said of any bad teacher's mishandling of anything, and the fault rests squarely with those who have misused it.  The grammar-translation method is an excellent approach for helping them achieve precisely what Mr. Bracey wants them to achieve, engagement with authentic, Roman-authored Latin.  Their engagement with authentic literature after having learned Latin through the G-T method is rich and full, for when they come to Cicero or Horace, Ovid or Vergil, they possess the linguistic framework with which to plumb the depths and explore the marvelous intricacies of meaning and style brought forth by authors who have rightly earned their place in the world's pantheon of writers.

Is there more that Latin teachers and Classics departments can do to help students of color hear what may be their calling into the tradition of passing along the world's cultural treasures to the next generation?  There most certainly is.  We begin by inspiring all of our students as we immerse ourselves and them in the richness of the Classical languages.  We allow students to take over our classes and teach their peers.  We encourage those in whom we see the spark of the magister or magistra to pursue one of the most noble of all human callings, in spite of educational systems designed to dehumanize the enterprise of learning.  And we do all this because we believe, in the words of the Latin playwright from North Africa, "homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto."  "I am a human being:  I think nothing that belongs to humanity to be alien to me."  (Heauton Timorumenos, 77)