It can be amazing to watch a child take the first steps into literacy—that is, if he does. In some cases—and two of my own children, both of them boys, fall into this category—the process is painful and long drawn-out, with the parent wondering whether this particular child will ever make the leap at all.

Here’s a hard truth that you might run up against when you’re dealing with a child who doesn’t take readily to reading: even when they finally are able to sound out letters and produce the spoken version of what is in front of them in print, they very often have no clue about what the author intended to convey.

This is a problem that children in colonial America didn’t have to face. People at that time learned to read in order to read the Bible. Literacy had a definite purpose—and it wasn’t so that when you came of age you could get a job with good health-insurance benefits in a big corporation. Your ability to read could help you get to heaven. As Protestants, the colonialists did not believe in handing over to a priest the job of interpreting holy scripture. Society’s consensus was that everyone needed to have direct access to the text of the Bible, and parents were committed to their children’s acquisition of this valued skill.

Young people in such a society had an important advantage over the children of our day, as they took up the challenge of becoming literate: they already had a lot of experience with the primary text that they were learning to read. They could fill in any gaps in their understanding of the printed page based on their extensive first-hand knowledge of what was (likely to be) written there. And even if they weren’t reading the Bible, any other reading materials that they had on hand employed similar language and came out of a similar world-view.

Nowadays, partly thanks to the proliferation of multi-culturalism, your child’s assigned reading material could be about almost anything: it could be on any subject known to mankind, from any aspect of prehistory up to cutting-edge research in any modern area of study, it could be based in any of an expanding field of specialty genres, and it could be from the literature of any corner of the earth, as long as somebody has translated it into English. (Of course, one thing you can be quite sure your public-school educated child will never read is anything from the Bible!) There is no body of literature that everyone across the U.S. has grown up familiar with and which can be used as a background for filling in the gaps that are so prevalent for new readers as they tackle unfamiliar texts.

It isn’t enough to be able to sound out letters and produce an audio equivalent of what is on the page or screen. Actual reading, of the sort that any student will be required to get through over the course of a middle- or high-school career, not to mention later levels, requires something more. It needs a lot of background knowledge, which can be acquired through life experiences, stimulating dinner-table talk, or extensive reading (or extensive being-read-to). Does your child have those advantages?

There is a way to give your child the totally unfair advantage of being able to connect with what any particular author is saying. It takes a little time to make this happen, but the fact that it is possible means that no one has to languish at the bottom of the class simply because all the other classmates were faster out of the gate. I’ll write about this in future posts.

• can read.
• can read between the lines.
• know how to set a big goal, break the big goal down into subgoals, formulate the actions necessary to achieve each subgoal, and carry out the actions, even if this involves tedium or difficulty.
• can interact effectively with people of different ages and social classes.
• can develop the creativity to think in terms of solutions.

As our nation’s system of public schools continues to stumble through the bureaucratic requirements of No Child Left Behind, the first item on the list above gets an awful lot of attention—which is, unfortunately, not to say that our nation’s system of public schools is producing a nation of avid and competent readers. It is not even producing a nation of competent employees.

The National Commission on Writing, an arm of the College Board (they’re the folks who brought us the SATs and the AP exams), reported in a 2004 study that a third of the employees in the top corporations in the U.S. had substandard writing skills and that such businesses were spending over $3 billion dollars a year on remedial training (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/business/07write.html). Good news for remedial writing teachers and owners of companies that provide remedial writing training (looks to be a growth industry!). Bad news for companies small and large, including everybody from CEOs to shareholders/owners, from all the vice presidents of this and that to the mid-level managers, from the supervisors to the employees on the front lines in sales, customer service, production, etc., etc., etc.

What exactly makes you think that your son or daughter isn’t going to be one of the people who needs remedial training (for which somebody will have to pay) to work in a company doing an entry-level job,  or who needs remedial classes (for which somebody will have to pay) to function in college-level courses that actually count towards an academic or technical degree?

My son, who will be a senior in high school in the coming fall, showed me—just this morning—an assignment that he is supposed to complete before the new school year for his English class. There’s a reading requirement and a short paper based on it. Almost all of the books on the list of choices are titles I never heard of. There are only two or three “classics”—Catch-22 being about the most challenging book in a field that features mostly “teen fiction,” a category that I don’t believe existed 20 years ago. I’d be really surprised if there turned out to be any teen-fiction item on my son’s English reading list that will be held up as a model of beautiful prose for future generations of writers and thinkers to pattern themselves after.

When I was a senior in (public) high school, we once got to choose between Julius Caesar and Macbeth for a unit in English literature. That was in the days when choice was still a new thing and before the National Council of Teachers of English had eliminated grammar (the key to unlocking difficult passages of highly refined prose or poetry) from the curriculum.

Are you deeply satisfied about the quality of English instruction that your son or daughter receives in school? If not, have you tried to do anything about it? Leave a comment!

You are well aware that school is a misery for your child, and yet there’s no alternative. You can’t quit your job and homeschool. Or, even you could quit your job or are already at home, you know that you’d never be able to homeschool under any circumstances, which might include the following obstacles: you wouldn’t know what to teach; you know just from helping your child with their homework that you couldn’t pull off being their teacher; people would think your family is weird; you’d worry that even if you managed to do a good job in a subject or two (but probably not), your child would end up missing something somewhere along the line, and it would be your fault.

So your child is stuck with their school for the foreseeable future, probably forever.

Maybe it’s time for you to methodically take stock of your resources; that is, take an inventory of all the assets either in your possession or at your disposal and then figure out how to make the very most of each one of these. Even if your child is stuck in a less than optimal situation, there is always some action you can take using some resource already in your possession, to move toward a satisfying outcome.

A long time ago, I worked for a non-profit. The director, to whom I reported directly, was a woman who was freakishly good at figuring out what resources were available to her. She needed that skill, considering that figuring out how to get the organization’s goals accomplished on a rather limited budget was not just a good idea, it was, as we say in Latin, a sine qua non (a “without which, not”), that is, a necessity.

For years, I simply marveled at her skill and let it go at that. It was not a skill that came naturally to me, and many times it happened that I would realize after the fact that I had been in possession of either (1) exactly what I needed to get a certain job done, or (2) a substitute that with a little bit of creative thinking would have worked just as well, or even better, than the specific tool I lacked. Now, thanks to my expanded view of my own potential, I know that I have every resource I need, to accomplish any goal I care to set out after.

You do too, and so does your underperforming child. In future posts, I’ll share some of the tools that I’ve found, to help you take stock of your situation and move on. Some of them are amazingly simple to apply. Some of them take practice. All of them will help you give your child an unfair advantage.

What about the task of educating your children? Any DIY tendencies there?

Most people leave that little job to the experts. And no wonder–what an array of experts, all properly trained and credentialed, it takes to run the average school.  Besides teachers, there are teacher’s aides, psychologists, social workers, curriculum specialists, librarians, deans, secretaries, academic counselors, safety officers, and attendance improvement specialists, not to mention all the levels of administration, which often includes at least a couple of layers of principals and a school board–and that’s just at the local level. You’ve also got regional offices and the state bureaucracy, all the way on up to the various arms of the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. It’s official: They know what everybody’s kids should learn, when they should learn it, and how the instruction should proceed.

How could a parent possibly have any confidence in their own abilities in comparison with the force of that mass of human capital?

And yet some parents do.

Their DIY approach to education–also known as homeschooling–means that they cut through all the layers of outside control and make the decisions themselves about what their children will study and how they will study it. That means they’ll get the credit or the blame for how their children turn out and where they end up in society. (Scary. Or exhilarating.)

But most parents, when the time comes, enroll their children in a school, public or private, and rely on that institution to educate their offspring.

You can tell from my tone that I don’t think this is necessarily the best approach. In theory, I believe that far more kids than are currently being homeschooled would be better off with a parent as their instructor. However, I have no illusions that the masses of parents are going to stop relying on the formal school systems in place to educate their children. There is simply too much inertia in favor of “letting the schools do their job.”

What I do think is realistic–and absolutely necessary–is for parents to be aware of what sort of an education their children are getting in their formal school setting. How can any expert, no matter what their credentials, make a claim to a level of investment in a child that the parent has?

I will develop this idea further in future posts. For now, consider the example of Cato the Elder, the Roman statesman who lived in the second century before Christ. The common practice among well-to-do Romans in Cato’s day (and for many years afterwards) was to turn over the foundational education of their children to a well-educated Greek slave, who was a valued and trusted member of the household. Cato, however, thought that instruction should be given by the father himself, who not only would impart the basics of schooling but also would shape the child’s character.

What was the term used to describe this Greek slave? He was a pedagogue, from which we get our word pedagogy, ‘the art or profession of teaching’.

Do you think your daughter’s school is enabling her to reach her highest potential? Do you feel that your son’s school is the perfect place for him to develop into all that he can be? If you said yes, you won’t have any interest in the topics of this blog.

But if you said no, then let’s hang out together for a bit.

I have four children, a couple of them now grown, and we’ve had a pretty good assortment of school arrangements over the years: public schooling, private schooling, homeschooling, afterschooling (I was too scared and up against too many barriers to give unschooling a serious try)–and nothing has been completely ideal, but then nothing in this world ever is, right? Over the years as I’ve dealt with the issues surrounding educating my children, I’ve been variously energized, frustrated, inspired, angry, tired, determined to persevere, perplexed, resigned, engaged, distant, hopeful, and eaten up with worry.

As my children moved through their years of schooling, I’ve veered between a lofty idealism and short-term pragmatism, I’ve jumped through lots of hoops I didn’t believe were worth jumping through but which were socially expedient to get to the other side of, and, after much inward struggle and soul-searching, I ended up casting aside a lot of what I once believed about education. Like almost everyone, I started out basing my model and my outlook on my own personal experience.

My children’s experiences, though, forced me to look at the issue from a different perspective, one which I resisted for a long time. It was a remark that my husband made–”He’s a kid; he hates school”–that led to my shift in thinking. I had been complaining to him about how one of our sons had no motivation at all to embrace anything that he was being taught at school. I couldn’t figure out how a person (at least not a child of mine!) could simply not care about school. My husband’s comment was the first inkling I had that my outlook, which involved implicit trust in my teachers and any demands they placed on me, a strong desire to please, and a belief that doing well in school was one of the greatest things a child could aspire to, was not shared by all. I did not immediately manage to wrap my head around this idea.

On one level, this blog is about what I discovered as I tried to figure out what to do about a kid who hated school and a father who thought that was normal.

The tough thing about fomenting a social or education revolution is that it takes a dreamer, a visionary even to think of starting off on such an impossible undertaking, but then the details require a top-rate manager to get on top of them and fit them all together into a coherent plan. I’ve got the vision part down, I think, but I am far from being a top-rate or even third-rate manager.

So how do I ever expect to make this idea of mine, of first getting Latin onto the radar screen of masses of people and then of getting a decent proportion of them to actually take up the language on some level or other, with (I hope) at least a pretty fair chunk wanting to take me up on whatever offer I might put on the market?

Well, for one, I’m in a process of continual education and self-improvement, and I soak up whatever useful ideas I find and do my best to implement them. I read and hear again and again, from the authors and speakers I follow, that “success leaves tracks.” In the 8 minutes and 44 seconds that I have left–make that 8 minutes and 26 seconds–I can hardly think of the names of the people who have made a big impression on me with their ideas and words, but I have recently arrived at the point where I am bringing fewer and fewer library books home and removing myself from some of the lists I’m on–unthinkable just two or three months ago.

The reason is that I think I’ve got a handle on all the theory that I need. Now is the time to put it into action. Now is the time to jump in there, no matter how scared I am that the whole plan may fizzle and that everything I’ve been aiming at for the last half a dozen years may come to naught, or may have such a small effect in the world, that it really was not worth everything I sacrificed (mostly the tranquility of my immediate family).

I’ve got only a minute (plus 18 seconds–make that 12 seconds) left to wrap up. I think I’ll climb down from the rope and call it a victory.

I’m sure I’ll get better at this. Maybe I’ll have some readers by then.

I believe that where it occurs this cycle of looming cuts, loud protests, and backing off (for the time being) is an indication that the marketing function among professionals in classics has gone dead. In fact, marketing and classics (or marketing and Latin) are not two words that one often finds in the same sentence. This is not a good thing.

The days are long gone when society simply expected Latin to be part of a curriculum. The days are also long gone when students filled the classes offered, either because they were headed for a field in which Latin was required or they wanted the benefits they knew they could expect to gain from studying Latin.

Latin must compete for the attention of education bureaucrats and of students, against more subjects and time-fillers than ever before, and if the case for it is not compelling or is not even made in the first place, then it is no wonder–considering its perceived status as a dead language relevant only to elites who make no real contribution to society’s progress–that it is so easily dispensed with among the general public. My argument is that everyone who has any love at all for Latin or Greek needs also a basic education in marketing and needs to put it into practice as best they can.

Here’s my advice: Move a couple of the Loebs over on the shelf, and make room, for instance, for Brian Tracy’s The Psychology of Selling: How to Sell More, Easier, and Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible.

(1) I’m going to have to actually implement the routines that I have supposedly put in place to make myself more organized and productive.

(2) I’m going to have to write quickly–no revisions, no letting an idea marinate on and on, no getting sidetracked while checking a fact.

But what about the fact that I have no subscribers? Seth said it doesn’t matter (http://upmarket.squidoo.com/2012/02/08/we-are-all-weird/).

• Latin is exactly the right distance from English, linguistically speaking.  It’s not too familiar and not too alien. There’s just the right amount of contrast between Latin and English so that the details of each language show up in high relief when you place them next to each other. You’ll discover things about English that you won’t ever find out if you choose, for instance, only Spanish as a foreign language. And you won’t be able to see useful commonalities if you start off your foreign-language study with a language such as Korean or Arabic, which are from language families very far removed from either Latin or English.
• Some of our grammar rules in English are derived from Latin models, sometimes resulting in pointless restrictions.[1] But the fact is that these restrictions were observed for quite some time, and so when you read English literature from the last couple of centuries, you will find certain structures are used and others are avoided. You’ll have an insider’s view of what’s going on in such texts if you know some Latin.
• Likewise, in studying Latin you’ll figure out which English rules you can break and which you’d better follow carefully. And if you choose to break a rule, you’ll be able to defend yourself if the need should arise.
• I don’t think I need at this point to bring up the fact that more than half of English vocabulary derives from Latin. (That was an example of a rhetorical device called preterition, in which an author says that he’s not going to mention something, but of course in order to do that, he has to mention it. Preterition is one of the many rhetorical devices that you learn about if you study Latin, and these devices are used in English as well as in Latin.)

Latin instruction should be given early. Here’s why:

• It takes time to build up a good base of knowledge. If you start early, the pressure is considerably lessened.
• Children exposed to instruction in Latin—or any foreign language for that matter—don’t have a chance to develop a fear of foreign languages. They aren’t afraid to make mistakes, and their sense of fun and of endless possibility emboldens them to play with the language and figure out what it can and cannot do.

Every child in the U.S. should have an opportunity to receive Latin instruction at an early age. Here’s how:

• All the elementary schools in the U.S. that don’t have Latin (which must be over 99 percent of them) can add Latin to the curriculum currently taught.
• Since that isn’t going to happen, parents could take charge. They could hire a Latin tutor, sign their kids up for an online course, or—my personal favorite—learn Latin themselves and teach it to their children. This latter is quite possible, even though, based on the conversations I’ve had with many “ordinary” people, most people don’t think it’s at all possible. I’ll write about this more in future postings, but in the meantime, here’s something to think about that I found in a wonderful piece by Amy Bloom: “If you can raise toddlers and teenagers with relative calm, you can be a CEO. If you’re a good driver, you can probably steer a cab, fly a plane, captain a boat. My years as a waitress―serving food to demanding people in a high-stress environment without losing my temper―served me equally well as a mother, a wife, and a short-order cook for my family. And if you have the teaching gene, you can teach anything. (I mean it. All you have to do is be one lesson ahead of your students. Sole meunière,[2] Latin and Greek, algebra―you can teach it!)”This can be found at http://blog.amigram.com/just-special/life-lessons-from-amy-bloom/. And let me point out that no parent can honestly say that they don’t have the teaching gene. If your child is functioning on any level at all, then you must have taught them thousands and thousands of things.

Once you (and your child) have got some Latin under your belt, what should your third language be? Anything at all! Whatever you pick will go quicker and easier for having started off with Latin. That goes also for your fourth and fifth languages.

When my youngest was in second grade, a visitor to her class asked, “Who all here knows Spanish?” Several kids raised their hands, including one girl who my daughter knew good and well did not come from a Spanish-speaking family but whose arm shot up enthusiastically anyway. The visitor looked around and said, “OK, I’ll have you sit with me one by one for a short conversation in Spanish.” My daughter saw her classmate’s arm slink back down.

My daughter’s classmate knew only a few words of Spanish, but she still felt a sense of ownership and connection to the language.

Grown-ups aren’t usually so cheerful in their outlook. We tend to think that if we can’t function in a foreign language about as well as we function in the one we grew up with, then we’ve not really accomplished anything. We also tend to think that if we can’t afford to travel somewhere and immerse ourselves in the environment where a foreign language is spoken that we can’t learn it. It is possible, however, to work around both of these ideas, and the first step is to stop concentrating on an ideal situation.

Most of us don’t have an ideal situation for learning a second language. So why don’t we reexamine the options and see what kind of knowledge we could get with the resources we do have?

I’m going to talk specifically about ways of knowing Latin here; the next post will be about why Latin is the best second language for most English speakers to take up.

• The simplest way of knowing Latin is just knowing some Latin words that form the basis of English words. About sixty percent of English words are derived from the Latin lexicon (lexicon is just the list of words in a given language, although this word is sometimes used as a synonym for dictionary). For instance, you learn that the Latin word alere (pronounced AH-leh-reh) means ‘to nourish’, and you learn that alimentation, alimentary (as in ‘alimentary canal’), alimony, alto, and altitude are all derived from it. Alma mater, also a usage with alere, has been brought straight into English. There are many books available that teach vocabulary acquisition based on Latin roots (such books usually include a lot of Greek roots, too). They usually provide a heavy dose of prefixes and suffixes.
• Another way of knowing Latin is being aware of the historical background of the speakers of the ancient language—in other words, becoming acquainted with Roman culture. When you study Roman culture, you naturally pick up at least a little Latin. Again, there are many books on the market that introduce Roman culture and history. Children’s books are a good starting point, because their authors assume no previous background on the part of the reader. When I want to learn about a topic that is a mystery to me, I head to the children’s section of the library. Who cares if you end up with a superficial, black-and-white treatment of a complex topic? At least now you’ve got some sort of framework for further study.
• You can start informally studying actual Latin grammar, either by yourself (using self-study material) or with a tutor. Are you satisfied with knowing a little? Then stop after a few weeks or months. Even with a little Latin, you’ll gain a greater awareness of how language works—and not just English or Latin. Are you thirsty for more? Then keep going as far as you want. At some point you’ll know enough grammar and vocabulary to actually read the classical Roman authors such as Cicero, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Caesar, and so on.  There are several approaches to learning Latin, and I’ll discuss those in a future posting.
• If you can make it through all the Latin grammar (which takes a year of college work or two years of high school work, or however you long you want if you work independently), you’ll have the option of attending one of the half a dozen Latin immersion camps offered around the U.S., mostly in the summer. You’ll have to sign a pledge that you’ll speak only Latin for the duration of the camp. It will be more fun than humans should be allowed to have (to borrow a phrase from David Letterman).
• You can enroll in a Latin education program at the closest university that offers such a thing and work intensively for four years to become a Latin teacher.
• You can study for four years at the undergraduate level, do two years of master’s level work, and go through three plus years of a Ph.D. program to become a professor of classical philology (learning Latin and Greek, of course—with German and either French or Italian an integral part of the package).

The important thing to keep in mind is that you do not have to make a major investment of time to start studying Latin. You can start by yourself, you can study a little at a time, you put it down when you need to and pick it up again when you can. There are lots and lots of milestones on the way to mastery, and any one of them can be a happy place to be.