There's an old saying that if you don't know where you're going, any road out of town will do. So it is when it comes to pedagogy. For example, one Latin textbook series begins introducing war vocabulary in the first year to prepare students to read Caesar's De Bello Gallico in the second. My favorite elementary Greek text introduces the vocabulary of Xenophon so students will be able to read his Anabasis.
A friend shared with me a recent article, "Classical Schools Aren't Really Classical" by Jonathan Roberts that contrasts grammar-based methods of teaching Latin with comprehensible input. It begins with a passage from Surprised By Joy by C.S. Lewis in which Lewis describes the thrill of being able to read extended passages of Homer's Iliad in Greek. Roberts goes on to suggest that the human brain will come to understand a language without being taught explicitly to analyze its architecture as is common in the grammar-translation methods.
From there Roberts discusses the Classical education movement, inspired largely by an essay from Dorothy Sayers and put into practice by a growing number of Christian schools and homeschool communities. He cites examples of why the grammar-translation method is hailed in such schools and then refutes the arguments for such pedagogy.
The title of his article is partly correct and partly incorrect. It is true that ancient Roman children did not learn their own language, at least initially, through grammatical analysis. St. Augustine famously talks about this in Book I of his Confessions.
cur ergo graecam etiam grammaticam oderam talia cantantem? nam et Homerus peritus texere tales fabellas et dulcissime vanus est, mihi tamen amarus erat puero. credo etiam graecis pueris Vergilius ita sit, cum eum sic discere coguntur ut ego illum. videlicet difficultas, difficultas omnino ediscendae linguae peregrinae, quasi felle aspergebat omnes suavitates graecas fabulosarum narrationum. nulla enim verba illa noveram, et saevis terroribus ac poenis ut nossem instabatur mihi vehementer. nam et latina aliquando infans utique nulla noveram, et tamen advertendo didici sine ullo metu atque cruciatu, inter etiam blandimenta nutricum et ioca adridentium et laetitias adludentium. didici vero illa sine poenali onere urgentium....
Why, therefore, did I hate Greek grammar singing also such things? For Homer is skilled at weaving such tales and is sweetly entertaining, but to me as a boy he was bitter. I believe Vergil is the same for Greek boys when they are forced to learn him in this way as I was Homer. Indeed there is a difficulty, entirely the difficulty of learning a foreign language as if someone spread bitterness over all the Greek sweetness of those fabulous tales. For when I was an infant, I knew no Latin, but nevertheless I learned it by paying attention and without any fear or punishment, among the coaxing of my nurses and the jokes of those who laughed with me and the happiness of those who played with me. Truly, I learned it without the burdensome penalty of people forcing me....
Yet Augustine also makes it clear that a grammar-based approach was precisely what he had experienced when it came to learning Greek. One could then argue both ways, that it is and that it is not Classical to teach with this pedagogy.
The question, of course, is not merely what did the ancients do, but what is best for our children. Roberts cites arguments for the grammar-based approach that are easily refuted, as he indeed does, but there is more to consider here, and that is the question at the beginning of this post. Where are you going? Once you know that, you can pick the best road to travel.
If your goal is to read Homer and Vergil with the speed and facility with which you read a contemporary author, then comprehensible input will likely get you there more quickly. If, however, your goal is something else, one Roberts does not consider, then the grammar-translation approach will serve you better. This goal is developing an appreciation for beauty, in this case linguistic beauty, that will nourish the spirt and inspire further reading and study, whether in translation or in the original languages. For more on this, see my article "Difficile est transferre hanc sententiam Latinam in Anglicam: The Depth and Charm
of Latin Translation," The Classical Outlook, Volume 84, Number 1, Fall 2006.
Consider now the tale of two students. One completes a four year high school program in Latin using the grammar-translation method, and the other does the same but with comprehensible input. They both then pursue an undergraduate degree in Classics. At the end of eight years of study, they will be indistinguishable. They will both be able to read fluently and to appreciate the nuances of composition that make the works of Homer and Vergil true works of art.
Yet how many will pursue those additional four years of an undergraduate degree in Classics? Most high school Latin students will not, and at the end of their high school careers, our two hypothetical students could not look more different. The one, presumably, would have a deep appreciation for, in Poe's words, "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" as expressed in Classical literature. The other would have the skill and pleasure of reading that literature with ease and rapidity.
"Knowing how way leads on to way," to quote Frost, I doubt that many of those who can read Classical languages fluently at eighteen will continue to do so. Notice that I said I doubt many will do so. Some may, but most, I imagine, will not. On the other hand, I have had a great number of my former students continue their Classical interest and studies, whether through an undergraduate minor, additional Classics courses, or merely personal reading, and they have all experienced the grammar-based instruction of my classroom. Notice again that I did not say all of my students have done this. At the end of the day, however, I still champion and use the grammar-translation approach, not for the rigor of analysis it supposedly instills in students comparable to the study of geometry or physics, and certainly not for linguistic gains in word study and derivatives. I use it it for the following reasons.
First, it quickly gets students into the language. Second, it allows them to explore more deeply the beauties and intricacies of truly great authors. Third, our English discussions allow us to go deeper and more quickly into the heart of the works themselves. Fourth and finally, thirty years of teaching have shown that students who are exposed to this particular pedagogy have multiple roads to take toward whichever destination they choose, whether it be fluency, enjoyment, further study, or anything else to which they have been inspired. Since giving my students multiple options is where I want to go, the grammar-translation road is the one I choose.
