Apparently the AQA examinations board is dropping Latin & Greek as subjects from 2006:
This is really bad news, seriously. Only one board offering Latin and Greek…
hey bingley, your concern and notification thereof is appreciated, respect 
Did our dear whiteoctave once say them to be the best examination board? How are the lexica? I hope it’s better than the 2.5 aqa word list 
Hate mail would be going their way, if I cared.
I’m glad they are out of the frame, because the other oxford people have more complex requirements. Plus I knew it was going downhill when AQA took out the English to Latin a few years ago because only 5 people out of like 3000 did it! Mind you, my exams a week or two ago were not much better, I did the english to latin (45 minutes) in 5 minutes. It was too easy to the extent that I missed out and read badly the English in a wave of complacency 
I was slightly angry because they were just out of context sentences, not a passage as expected. Every one is going downhill. Greek and Latin does not belong in the terrible schools of these days, it belongs in your domicile at 4 am by candle light.
It’s odd that a topic of this nature should come up today, because it was only yesterday that I decided not to do at all Latin to A Level and not to begin Greek at all (while listening to Janet Jackson runaway).
Umm… I don’t know school politics in the UK, so what are the implications of this? Anybody saying Classics is thriving is in real denial…
Greek and Latin does not belong in the terrible schools of these days, it belongs in your domicile at 4 am by candle light.
I generally have the impression that Latin (and Greek) are being made less and less important by the school system. For instance, in Danish high school (upper secondary school), you choose whether you want to study primarily languages or maths and sciences. In the old days, if you wanted to study languages, you had to know a bit of Latin in order to enroll, and the first year of high school you’d learn even more Latin. Then they dropped the requirement that students know Latin before enrolling and changed the system so that they’d start from scratch the first year; basically, the test that you had to pass just to be accepted into high school was now the exam you took after the first year of school. In a few years the requirement that students learn Latin will disappear entirely. On a similar note, in the old days you had to know basic Latin in order to practice as a physician or dentist. That requirement was dropped as well.
Today I took the exam language students take after their first year (I’m not a language student, but I like like Latin 
), and I have to say, I’m not impressed. The exam is oral; you get a text (I had 10 lines from De Bello Gallico), get 20 minutes of preparation (where you can bring grammars, notes, dictionaries). The examination itself is 20 minutes as well; first you have to read the text aloud, then translate it, grammatically analyze it, and finally talk about the culture and affairs brought up by the text (e.g. who was Caesar? What was going on in Rome at the time? What was he doing in Gaul? etc.) No text at the exam is unknown; you’ve been reading everything during the year. So nothing new there, all the texts have been analyzed in class. All right, I did my reading aloud (with several errors that I noticed myself), I did my translation (blatantly ignoring Caesar’s use of present tense and changing everything to perfect until my teacher commented on that), I analyzed the text (Caesar isn’t difficult if you know your ablatives absolute), and we talked a bit about Caesar and Gaul and Vercingetorix. The grade I got – the equivalent of an American “A+”. I should add that in Denmark that grade is practically never given; it is reserved for the extremely convincing and independent performance; mine was neither. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being ungrateful or anything, I’m actually very happy. But I can’t help thinking, if what I did was that good, then, for the love of God, the average “B” student must be awful (I studied it on my own, not at school; so I haven’t actually seen students at the same level).
Sorry for my rant; I guess it was one of the typical, “what is this world coming to” 
My point is, the state of affairs is very sad indeed in Denmark as well.
That’s an interesting insight; I fear the situation in U.K. is worse however. You no longer have to grammatically analyse anything. Still this is better as there is more influence (not saying there’s a great influence, just more than of old) on learning it through exposure as they do with modern languages. The bad thing is you have to analyse poetry in terms of effects and techniques which is boring and pointless, it does not help language. Poems are the worst.
At least you guys can even still take latin and greek at all in school! We do not even have that option. 
NO ONE in canada learns latin and greek except if they decide to do it on their own, or are homeschooled. It’s very sad.
I guess I should feel privileged…
feeling privileged
HOW—WHAT–HUH–OH MY DAYS–BUT–!!!
NEARLY FAINTING
OUTRAGE
Hōs exsecror! Qui contumelia!
How are things in the rest of the curriculum? Are priorities shifting to other subjects? For example, are the schools encouraging students to spend more time studying math and the sciences? Or is the entire curruculum being watered down, in your opinion?
Are the secondary schools teaching Asian languages? (Chinese, Japanese?)
Just curious.
How are things in the rest of the curriculum? Are priorities shifting to other subjects? For example, are the schools encouraging students to spend more time studying math and the sciences? Or is the entire curruculum being watered down, in your opinion?
Are the secondary schools teaching Asian languages? (Chinese, Japanese?)
Generally there’s much more focus on the sciences; much debate is about how to further strengthen natural sciences and the students’ interest in them. So the curriculum as a whole isn’t deteriorating, but the priorities are changing to tangible subjects that have a definite application in the current society. While I agree that science is very important, and have a big interest there myself, I find this development a bit unfortunate; any society has a need for a basic understanding of itself and its own history, so I think dismissing the classics and the insight they bring like this is a mistake.
Most schools offer Japanese if there’s sufficient interest from the students (naturally, a course won’t be started if there’re only two participants).
On a similar note, during my own attempts at learning Latin, I’ve signed up for several courses and repeatedly been turned down because I was the only one who signed up. I find this rather amusing in a way…
Here they are actually shifting towards more Greek…(in my school at least). All the new pupils are starting to learn Greek and French a year earlier than I did, and two years below me they have 2 Greek and 2 French classes! Normally you have 1 small Greek class, no more than 20.
My school couldn’t care less about the government’s education council in Mainz, they just tell everyone to take music, Latin and art. Which is really annoying for me at least. They spend all their time and effort on music and nothing on the sciences !
Generally I think standards are going up though. I’m learning stuff now my dad learned at uni. I certainly have to learn more than both my parents.
- but -
It’s just learning… somehow I feel we are going into too much detail sometimes and learning useless details we’ll just forget in a year or so, instead of learning the more basic important things. In chemistry for example, we spent ages learning some useless reaction mechanisms, but it’s only now we are doing plastics. There’s no chemistry major, only one minor course with 10 students left, so everyone else in my year will leave school not knowing how plastics are made, what plastic is made of and so on. I think people might remember that sort of thing, and that it’s important, whereas no one really cares about some stupid reactions between alcohols and acids or whatever.
Basically we are learning loads of stuff, but I feel that most of it is unnecessary.
At least we are all going to Rome tomorrow, that isn’t pointless
.
I am the only one in the tri state area doing latin. The rest of them are up north in the grammar schools.
All the nuts call me a geek and a loser and throw their beans at me. I tell them to stop but they throw me in a bin full of AQA Physical Education test papers.
There is no passion AT ALL ANYWHERE today at least in the US and it seems in the UK also so that is why they are dropping the exams. I go to “one of the top 100 public high schools” even so you’d think that we’d have some sort of subject cults, some sort of obsessive group who cares! No! It’s all formulated, faked, ENTHUSIASM, and we write “I am passionate about, because, well-rounded, blah” but it’s a complete LIE. I get A-s on my math tests but I know I’m a D student at heart and A+s on Latin “tests” (multiple choice!!!??) while I’m a B+ student at best and I hate this system! The B students you’re talking about, ricelius, are the students who walk home, slump on the chair and think about how nice it would be right about now to read that university physics textbook they bought but they’ve gotta study for that darn Latin exam because they have to seem “well-rounded” darnit. Traho trahere truxi tructum? Nope. I have to learn this. Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. Even though I’ll never be good and I could be a total happy physics genius I’ll be pushed into relative mediocrity in both with a big A. Everyone gets pushed into this mentality so there is no excellence anywhere, only rote memorization, grade grubbing, and LOW expectations. It makes sense though because it’s unrealistic to expect the diligent study that comes from LOVE of something you hate and oh yes we’re all about well-roundedness here. So I’ve been holding the UK as some divine land of happy specialization for a while now but I guess I’ll have to wait for college.
Sorry Amy, it’s pretty much worse here What if I had to catch the bus I still stay with my mother. I only did not absent myself from the other 24 exams for my mother, but I actually like latin, although the tests took some of that away. They are for people as you say who study hard and are fake. It’s hard to not study at all for tests that are made entirely for losers memorizing things, but that’s what I did. Latin is not going to turn into Science.
I was very worried about AQA pulling out of Classics. (My jaw dropped when I was told). OCR may be the better and deeper board with greater choice of texts, but there will soon be no choice between boards. And, my Greek teacher did make the point that if OCR must integrate the people who would have done AQA, then they may need to dumb down their syllabus even more than they are currently doing.
I mean, I took my AS exams last week. The Greek language paper, well, it was a piece of Xenophon’s Anabasis, edited. I had done the unedited version at the beginning of the year. Words in the vocabulary list were glossed and main parts of common irregular verbs were given as vocabulary even though surely it says in the syllabus that these things should be learned? There was constant repetition of constructions, grammar and vocabulary throughout the translation and I finished it in about 10 minutes (the exam is an hour).
Seriously, all this ‘We’re getting cleverer’ stuff you read about is tosh. The exams aren’t getting easier? Er, yes they are! It’s almost insulting having to do them.
Episcopus- There is still some grammatical analysis in Latin/Greek A2, at least in OCR in you choose the comprehension option. (Of course this would mean not doing prose…)
Terentia
haha did you just work out that exams are getting easier?
I have an O Level french composition book. No GCSE french student can conjugate the present indicative active of etre. No le/la/les. O Level goes to imperfect subjunctive. Enough said.
You have a Greek teacher 
Pull your jaw back up, you are lucky.
Excuse me!!! Je suis, tu es, il/elle/on est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils/elles sont.
No le, la, les!.. Je ne crois pas qu’il y a des élèves qui ne savent pas
le, la, les. C’est incroyablement mauvais!
Imperfect subjunctive? That’s the finisse, finisses, finît, finisions, finissez, finissent one, isn’t it? I’ve heard that even some bac students can’t conjugate that.
alors…est-ce que c’est seulment mon ecole qui suce de grand archeveque…Je ne mentis point, je dis toujours la verité.
Il est probable que ton college est un des meilleurs du pays. Le subjonctif imparfait tu le connais? Lorsque j’ai vu tes conjugaisons je ne croyais pas que tu ne fusses qu’un normal etudiant de gcse! Je ne le crois pas encore! Tu l’as cherché dans un livre de grammaire? Je suis etonné que tu le connaisses! Qui que ce soit qui en sache un peu est tres fort en francais, meme s’il ne sait pas le conjuger.
que Je finisse, finisses, finít, finissions, finissiez, finissent.