There\u2019s been a lot of debate in the UK recently over what language skills should be taught to children, and when.<\/p>\n
Since learning a second language stopped being compulsory in secondary school, there appears to have been a decline in the amount of students taking up a language, with a knock-on effect on university courses, and perhaps the economy.<\/p>\n
So could Latin<\/a> be the solution?<\/p>\n According to this report<\/a>, the language has been popular in pilot schools in Cambridgeshire, and the project has just been expanded. Latin is seen as a good way of introducing children to language learning, especially of the Romance languages<\/a>, of which Latin is the root. It also provides an interesting way to look at history and civilization, says the head of the project.<\/p>\n Others argue that children would be better off learning a language that they can use in more practical ways. Spanish<\/a>, for example, is the world\u2019s number 2 language<\/a> in terms of number of speakers, so would arguably be far more helpful for children travelling and eventually going into business.<\/p>\n Whatever the debate, it\u2019s good to see that someone is pushing for language learning for British schoolchildren. I learned some French and German at school but have continually been put to shame by my European counterparts who can speak fluent English! <\/p>\n *That\u2019s \u201cthe dog ate my homework\u201d by the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s been a lot of debate in the UK recently over what language skills should be taught to children, and when. Since learning a second language stopped being compulsory in secondary school, there appears to have been a decline in the amount of students taking up a language, with a knock-on effect on university courses, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3,40,219,327],"tags":[422,123,421,425,423,424,234],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-english","category-language-acquisition","category-latin","category-spanish","tag-children","tag-language-learning","tag-language-skills","tag-languages-for-children","tag-latin-teaching","tag-romance-languages","tag-second-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":511,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions\/511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}