Credit: This story was first seen on The Telegraph
Parents trying to help children with school work often struggle to dredge up what they once learned in maths or English, let alone Latin, The Telegraph reports.
But now some adults are signing up for Latin refresher classes, or taking on the language for the first time, so that they can help their offspring get ahead of the pack.
The classics department at a private school in London has found itself oversubscribed after it began offering Latin evening classes to parents.
Take-up from parents at Colfe’s School, in south-east London, has been so high it now runs two Monday night Latin classes.
Interest in the Roman Empire is also riding high due to a glut of popular novels, history books and television series.
Expert classicists and historians, such as Mary Beard, Bettany Hughes and Michael Scott, are now celebrities while novelist Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy is to be adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Since 2014, foreign language lessons have been compulsory in primary schools from age seven and Latin is on the list of languages that schools can teach.
It is currently taught in about 700 state secondary schools and 450 independent senior schools – a doubling since 2000, according to the University of Cambridge Schools Classics Project. Some 50,000 pupils start to learn it each year, although less than a quarter of them take it at GCSE.
At Colfe’s, where headteacher Richard Russell is a classics scholar, all 12- and 13-year-old pupils study Latin and about 20% sit the O-level.
At A-level the language is offered under classical civilisation. And although the hours spent conjugating Latin verbs might not be among the happiest school memories for many parents, they have leapt at the chance to revisit the language.
Some 29 parents are currently studying the 10-week course at Colfe’s and two-thirds of them are new to Latin.
Claire Hadingham said: “I only studied the subject for a year at school and needed to brush up on the basics to be able to understand and engage with my [Year 8] daughter around the subject.”
Dawn Oliver, who had not practised Latin for 56 years but is keen to encourage her 14-year-old granddaughter, said: “The rote learning in my days at school is still there so I can relearn quite quickly.”
Angela Bruce, whose five-year-old is yet to tackle the subject, jumped at the chance. “The class is bringing this so-called dead language to life,” she said. Colfe’s also runs Latin for GCSE students from Lewisham as part of its partnership with state schools.
More than 30 local teenagers take the after-school classes and some will sit Latin GCSE. The first cohort of four to go through last year gained A*, A, A and B grades.