Latin, never as dead as some of its critics thought, is now staging quite a comeback in high schools and colleges, including The University of Michigan, where enrollment in courses in the Latin language has almost trip led in the last five years.
One of the most serious obstacles in the way of this revival movement, how ever, is a nation-wide shortage of high school teachers of Latin. One of many moves in the direction of lessening the shortage will be taken this summer at the University in the offering of an Advanced Placement Program Institute for Latin teachers. The Advanced Placement Program is designed to enable superior high school students to complete some college-level work while still in high school and to receive credit—and advanced placement—when they enter college. The University of Michigan is one of the participants in this national program and in recent summers has offered several of these special programs for teachers of the advanced courses in high school.
The University of Michigan has contributed in other ways to the new impetus in Latin teaching. Linguists at this institution have had a large part in developing the modern science of linguistics, so successfully used in the teaching of modern languages. The University's English Language Institute uses this method of structural linguistics in its program of teaching natives of other languages to speak English and also in training teachers from other countries who wish to teach English in their own lands. Applied to Latin, the structural linguistics method is now working a quiet revolution in high school teaching of this subject.
At Michigan, Latin is taught by the Department of Classical Studies, which also embraces the Greek language and literature and, indeed, all aspects of life in the ancient Mediterranean world from 1500 B.C. to about 500 A.D. The inclusiveness of Michigan's approach to the classical studies is perhaps unique among American colleges and universities. An interesting development from the work of this department has been the growth of a "great books" course in which Greek and Roman literature are taught in translation. This fall, 16 sections of this course were organized in response to student demand.
Little noted among the more spectacular scientific research programs in campus laboratories, the research work of the Department of Classical Studies continues to shed new light on ancient lives and times. A new book from the University Press, for example, is The Archive of Aurelius Isidorus, a translation of papyri in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and in The University of Michigan library by Prof. Emeritus A. E. R. Boak and Prof. Herbert C. Youtie. These documents detail a tax reform program at the end of the Third and beginning of the Fourth Century and include an account of the method then used of making up deficits in the state treasury by compulsory labor on public projects.
The Michigan Alumnus
February 13, 1960, page 226
