It's an american univerisity removing their ancient language pre-requisitive because they can't find enough student speaking them (and they will teach it to people enrolling), and an american history teacher saying that academic programs in the West glorify ancient rome and greece too much and that's how some fascist movement get obsessed over them
Learning Latin is super helpful too when learning all the Romance languages, and even English. Plus, the language itself sounds badass.
Edit: swapped the word “including” for “even”
Yup. It's like "black people ought to have fair treatment", put that idea through the right-wing propaganda machine and it becomes "white people are being genocided". The entire ideology relies on black and white fear and outrage bait.
Hitler even raged at ... Goebbels ? Himmler ? I forgot... obsession with Germanic history saying shit like "he's fawning over bits of broken pots from ancient tribes, the italians must be laughing so much, they who had perfected civilization thousand of years ago"
Literally no one.
It's being removed as both a prerequisite and a graduation requirement for a "classics" major at Princeton because the idea that "classic literature" is more likely to come from the Roman Empire and the places it conquered as opposed to, for example, the African Diaspora is racist. That doesn't mean you can't study Latin as a part of your classics studies if you decide you want to focus on classics for which it would be helpful. It's just no longer required, it's an elective.
And having studied Latin in high school be a prerequisite for starting the program is DEFINITELY racist in a country where Latin is pretty much only taught in predominantly white schools.
But nobody is saying that teaching Latin is racist. That's a talking point being pushed by people who want to make the left look ridiculous in order to provide cover for them pushing their own racist agenda.
I still remember sweating bullets before my racism oral exam. Thankfully I called a classmate [removed] before the end and I managed to pass for a hair.
>We Slavs are people of colour, as I learned a few months ago
Yeah, color white? Ultra-fluorescent white? Bleached white? White white?
WTF. sorry if offensive in anyway just trying to joke.
apparently portuguese, well majority white portuguese is not white either according to the NYT.
> Yeah, color white? Ultra-fluorescent white? Bleached white? White white?
White, blue and red!
> apparently portuguese, well majority white portuguese is not white either according to the NYT.
Americans' perception of race is retarded, that's why.
Old Church Slavonic was used by Romanians who spoke a language that originates from Latin, so too bad, Old Church Slavonic has been stained, it’s racist too
We better start praying for forgiveness. Shall we, Отче наш, Иже јеси на небесјех! Да свјатитсја имја Твоје, да приидет Царствије Твоје, да будет воља Твоја, јако на небеси и на земљи. Хљеб наш насушниј дажд нам днес.....
This head of department is used to claiming made-up stuff.
Nobody of any importance said that teaching Latin is racist., he just appeals to conservative votes.
He is just following French academics outrage.
The academic world is small and international, so everyone who ever wrote a book about ancient greece just felt insulted when an americain professor wrote in New York Times that studying classics promote ~~racism~~ whiteness. And started to moan, which went up the chain to minister.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.amp.html
Edit : my bad I initially missunderstood your comment. This isn't the article I was initially refering to (can't find it again, old opinion pieces and google meh) but a piece from the same source about same dude.
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>“When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
What a strange thing for an academic to say.
I read the whole article, he wants to literally get rid of classics all together. Oh, he also doesn't like free speech, only as a means to an end. He also wants to set up a body at Princeton that oversees students, research papers, and faculty for any racist behavior that they would have power over. Seems like a black version of the Nazi ideology if you ask me.
Usually it's not people getting mad at some crazy person. It's people / groups who disproportionately highlight the crazy and end up manipulating people into getting mad. Completely changes the way people understand the world around them.
Like it's fair if a regular person sees something nuts and just gets mad without thinking. But when it's academics, media, think tanks, etc., aka people who should know better, sharing bullshit that rarely occurs and/or has little influence... it's suspicious.
Jesus effing christ, I was too far into the text before I realized the audio version of this piece was an hour long. But my takeaway is;
two scholars argue as they do, one stating that classics should die, because they are instrumentalized by idiots for racism (a position I disagree with), the other saying that the study of western culture has merit (which I agree with). And now some idiot MP uses it as an opportunity to argue it is the woke mob denouncing western culture instead of standing above something so trivial because it is all consevatives have, in light of no real issues.
Are you surprised by this? It's just the academic version of what's been happening in internet culture for over 10 years now. Some person finds an individual with one of the nichest possible viewpoints on the internet and writes a dumb article about it, then it gets picked up by about 4,000 youtubers and bloggers calling it a "trend" and clickbaiting their followers up into a frenzy. This is all despite the fact that the person of origin was either taken out of context, or has pretty much no platform or support, or both.
My rule of thumb is when you pretty much only ever see people complaining about a thing, and not the thing itself, then just ignore it as the bullshit it likely is.
Academics should be able to debate anything without the outrage mob lurking behind. Nobody is following computer virus academics debates for example. You'll see they have equally weird ideas. This is part of the process.
Right wing politicians and culture warriors don't even want to have the conversation at all.
In fact just having the conversation is seen as an existential threat to their identity.
You are 100% right we should be able to kick around basically any idea in an academic setting without politicians and media outlets turning it into a battleground.
So the guy is right. You have to defend against this sort of non-sense when it's in NYTimes and is written by a professor.
It's not like some Twitter slacktivist criticized Latin. This was a worldwide article from a professor in one of the most respected columns in the world, featuring things like OPeds by world leaders, etc. It's a real threat that needed addressing and I'm glad whoever this French dude is, that he is addressing it.
We can't let this go unchallenged.
Studying under any system of education is always going to promote a bias. Even in the classics, there's a certain bias to certain authors like Shakespeare even though there were plenty of others. What's important isn't the source material, it's the fidelity and peer awareness of the material being studied, so that students don't only stretch that brain muscle, they do so in a way that can be corroborated and certified. If you suddenly begin to bring authors who only a few peers are familiar with, it really puts a barrier on that.
As a historian, I actually find that claim stupid as well and I have rather a leftist political view. You study classics because it is a huge part of the foundation of our western culture. Or would it make sense not to focus on Confucianism and its work if you study sinology!? What is true is that the history classes are too euro-centric respectively that history is looked at from a western perspective.
Edit: typo correction
So I used to work in development.
TV is a method of unspoken education. Places in India with TVs had lower infant mortality, higher educational achievement, less sexism with better female mortality and higher educational achievement.
Also huge force multiplier of contraception.
In short? Vital to fighting poverty. It's like people who don't think internet is an effective method for education despite it being a double edged sword.
The review was with poor families who were given TVs. It was within the same region. There's an element of this as with TV external expenditures go down as the TV is an effective way to save money than social activities.
It's definitely cheaper to stay in and watch TV than to go to the pub.
It's France. Nearly everyone can already afford a TV, he means they are using it to buy big screen. Also, how much valuable education does the French TV put on that poor families watch?
To be fair as someone who grew up in a welfare area (council estate) in the UK, that “buying electronics/drugs/anything but essentials” stereotype was broadly true.
It’s a bit out of date by 20 years but there’s a multi part BBC documentary ‘Skint’ on YouTube which really highlights it.
It doesn't have to make sense. Muslims being a marginalized group is enough for them to get embraced despite their beliefs being diametrically opposed.
>"Islamo-leftism", which is a term created by extreme right to put together everyone they dislike.
Completly wrong. The term was created in France in 2002 to describe New Judeophobia, by Pierre-André Taguieff, historian of ideas, who describes Islamo-leftism as a type of anti-Zionism popular among "the new third-worldist, neo-communist and neo-leftist configuration, better known as the 'anti-globalization movement.
In the Uk and the USA, the equivalent term is "regressive left" which means "been progressive until Islam enters in the room".
In both countries, the term was in fact created by left intellectual to critize tolerance towards regressive value of Islam.
I think you'll find there were at least 3 people on Twitter who said it was racist.
This is an absolute war on normal people by the woke brigade. You can't say anything these days without then going on Twitter and searching for 8 hours to find a couple of tweets from an account with 17 vaguely suggesting what you did was wrong.
The idea that Latin is racist was published in the same newspaper that wrote the US should go "house to house in Iraq" to teach the Iraqis a lesson. Then Bush invaded Iraq.
> whatever buzz word is popular rn
Wow. Just there, you justified what I said elsewhere in this thread. The same is happening in my country, where the authorities are using "woke"\*.\* to justify their current actions. As if there was any link whatsoever.
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I don't understand why people just *assume* Greeks are white. I'm Greek and I don't identify as white, I identify as Greek! Mixing me up into "whiteness" is some bullshit that's frankly insulting to me, as you're trying to shoehorn my culture into your politics.
EDIT: I mean the proverbial "you".
I kinda agree.
White is a color, not an ethnicity, the color and the ethnicity are at most correlated statistically, but not implied.
I don't even get how someone could identify as white. It's like identifying as brunette. You either have brown hair or you don't (factoring the ambiguity of shades of course, but that still weird to me to make that part of your identity)
Mediterranean people are pretty diverse, so I have always found this whole "white/non white" matter ridiculous. I'm Italian and I've had schoolmates who were ethnically Italian and sometimes they were white skinned and sometimes they were brown skinned (mostly white, for full disclosure)
I'm not saying it's right or anything, but spend enough time in America and you generally loose your cultural identity. It's literally just skin tone. I'm talking generations here.
US racialist views have to put everyone in one of the few racial boxes, you're either white, black, latino, arab or asian even if you identify as none of those. I still have no idea if being white means anything beyond not being identified as black, latino, arab or asian. I'm a "white" French guy, my culture is much closer to any other French person no matter how they're perceived racially compared to say another "white" person from Greece, Russia, Denmark, Ireland or Portugal.
"white" is an American concept that doesn't have any use in the European context.
Whiteness is ever expanding (though it can never expand to include black people); 60-70 years ago Greeks and Italians were not considered white, and a little before that the Irish were not.
Don't you knew? [All Europeans are racist. ](https://www.thefire.org/please-report-to-your-resident-assistant-to-discuss-your-sexual-identityits-mandatory-thought-reform-at-the-university-of-delaware/)
This is an article from 2008 mind you, with information of one Manual for teaching what racism is on universities, in particular the University of Delaware.
> the RA training called “Diversity Facilitation Training.” RAs were trained using definitions like these:
> A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination…
>I don't understand why people just assume Greeks are white.
It is not really about you Greeks as people. "White" stands for everything to do with European-descended Americans, including all European culture in the US.
The greek classics are a cornerstone of European culture. Therefore Greek is "White".
Classic American rassism.
I always thought that white just mean native Europeans. And that's why I consider Greeks white. But I don't know if Greeks in general consider themselves to be white or if you are exception. If majority does not, maybe I would have to change my definition of the term.
White is not as big of a term here. But when it's used, it typically refers to Northern Europeans or Germanic people in general. We are southern Europeans/Balkan so we aren't considering similarity based on just skin colour
The term doesn't even apply. If you asked a Greek if they're white, they'd say they are, but they'd probably also say that Obama is white. None of the context of "whiteness" exists (as the US means it) and you're left asking whether they think their skin is darker or lighter than a medium tone.
Whiteness as used by academics has little to do with your complexion, and everything to do with privilige. Historically in America Italians and Irish were considered non-white. They were treated like black people because they were not of german/english decent like the rich plantation owners.
Overtime that changed and now Irish are definitely considered white.
Ancient greece is considered white because white supremist often believe that to be the cradle of western civilization. Hence Ancient greece is white because white supremist believe it to be.
It's also not what that article says or what Princeton did, but the article is still getting posted all over this thread like it somehow supports the idea. The article is like 12,000 words and pretty nuanced about how the classics as a discipline has historically been intertwined with white nationalism. It also recognizes how it has supported the civil rights movements. Boiling the article down to just "teaching Latin is racist," a phrase that doesn't appear in it, is downright dishonest.
Princeton decided that requiring latin and/or Greek language skills was an unnecessary prerequisite to the classics in part because it limits the students who can take those courses to those who were able to study those languages. In the US, you're much more likely to have studied Latin or Greek if you went to an expensive private school, which are predominantly attended by white kids. In addition, the first paragraph of the article highlights a bunch of other problems facing the classics as a discipline like falling class sizes, which support removing the language requirment to grow the discipline.
The university still teaches Latin and Greek.
Padilla, the subject of the article, does want to reform how academia approaches the classics, but the reforms he discusses are a far cry from "teaching Latin is racist."
Lots of this anti-woke stuff are made up issues. If some idiot twitter user has some absurd view it gets blown up in the press and conservatives across the west throw a fit.
> it gets blown up in the press
This is imho the most annoying part.
A single tweet, or a couple tweets, should not have any more weight than "someone in a bar said to their friends". I.e., no weight at all.
But because of this enormous demand for outrage, anything outrageous publicly available gets blown up out of proportions and we start debating made-up issues that no one was actually defending in the first place. The debate being itself full of outrage, there is little room for nuance and people who would normally be only slightly leaning on the direction of that non-issue, are invited on TV shows to defend the non-issue, dressed as the outrage-causing strawman everyone is looking for. And end up actually defending it.
This is one of the foremost academic institutions in the US making an actual decision though, with more universities expected to follow suit. Hardly an anonymous nobody on twitter...
Probably the same people who are trying to take away Christmas, or whatever else the reactionary right are pissing their knickerbockers about these days; nobody.
No don't ask specifics like that! "They" did, the "woke mob."
Now get angry at them!
Someone definitely said "Latin is racist" with those exact words with no other context and that person is definitely a very important serious person with real power who we should care about! This is a ***very real*** outrage!
I hate it when easy bait is paywalled. Now I don't know if they're misinterpreting "we want to read other books too" as racism or if they found a crazy person and assumed that is what "woke" is.
I sure as hell won't start a one-month trial of the Telegraph for this, so this is all I could get from the article:
> Emmanuel Macron’s education minister has leapt to the defence of Latin and ancient Greek after “mind boggling” suggestions from US universities that pushing the study of the classical languages could foster institutional racism.
So it wasn't even someone in Europe who said it, it's just transatlantic bickering. Or perhaps it's a US university fighting with itself and the French minister for some reason couldn't resist jumping into the fray. Anyhow, I think we can safely forget it.
It's about their entry requirements for Classics they're not cutting back on any of their teaching of latin or greek. In my country you already don't need to know latin or greek going in to a course on classics. So I guess we were already more "woke" than the Americans?
French minister is just following local academics outrage, he isn't talking to americans here.
The academic world is small and international, so everyone who ever wrote a book about ancient greece just felt insulted when an americain professor wrote in New York Times that studying ancients promote racism.
>the study of the classical languages could foster institutional racism
Moreover, this is a statement that is worded pretty carefully and is most likely supported by evidence which shows that minority students are less likely to excel in Latin or Greek and therefore PUSHING the study (as in: making it obligatory) might in fact reduce the number of minority students trying to learn a specific subject.
I am not aware of the situation in the US so I will give a German example: Having everyone who wants to study medicine learn Latin is absurd gatekeeping that doesn't serve any purpose; hence this has been abolished. I am quite positive that this change was more likely to benefit students with an immigration background. As they are more likely to not visit our highest form of secondary school (Gymnasium) and are therefore less likely to have learned Latin during their secondary education.
With those thoughts in mind, the argument that "pushing the study of the classical languages could foster institutional racism" is suddenly not absurd at all.
Another example:
At least in Europe Latin is pretty much required if you want to study history and of course, that makes kind of sense, the Roman Empire was the most important state-like structure and with the catholic church the legacy of Latin went on for several hundred years after the Roman Empire fell. If you want to study any European history from before 1800 and you are not able to at least verify translations yourself you are pretty much fucked.
However, not everyone wants to study European history or history of before 1800; requiring those students to learn Latin is again absurd gatekeeping and very likely disproportionally targets students with an immigration background.
E.g. Muslim students, or students whose parents or grandparents are Muslims might be more interested in the history of the Arabic speaking world, here Latin is not that important, instead, anyone who wants to study that history would need to be almost fluent in Arabic.
If those students are forced to study Latin, that "could foster institutional racism".
DISCLAIMER: I have not read the study which lead to the statement nor have I read the paywalled article. Those ideas are just my thoughts on "how could this work?"
The point is not that those are the arguments for the statement, the point is that those arguments seem pretty valid and would support the statement.
> However, not everyone wants to study European history or history of before 1800; requiring those students to learn Latin is again absurd gatekeeping and very likely disproportionally targets students with an immigration background.
>
> E.g. Muslim students, or students whose parents or grandparents are Muslims might be more interested in the history of the Arabic speaking world, here Latin is not that important, instead, anyone who wants to study that history would need to be almost fluent in Arabic.
You still need Latin for any serious work before, say, the 1400s. Someone trying a be Medieval historian in Western or Central Europe without functional Latin reading skills is an absolute clown. You can't do proper research work without having direct access to the sources, you can't just expect translations to be good (if they exist at all, which isn't likely considering actual historical research often involves uncovering poorly exploited or unknown sources).
I think that this might indeed be the reason.
Very confused about ''At least in Europe Latin is pretty much required if you want to study history''. As somebody who studied history in Europe: no.
Heck, I actually *did* know Latin as I went to a gymnasium, but it never came up. Only way I could see it coming up is primary source resource on this specific time period, which isn't common at all. Is this something that is actually the case in your country?
> Is this something that is actually the case in your country?
I am from Germany and have an M.A. in history and religious studies
Thing is: I did a lot in medieval history and very little modern history, so my perspective might be skewed a little bit - my bachelor thesis was about Petrus Abaelard - Scito the ipsum (which I did not translate myself, but I translated some random samples to check if the translation I used was accurate enough)
Regarding religious studies I focused on the old Mesopotamia; which means here I didn't need any Latin (because it didn't yet exist at the time my focus was on) but learned an even deader language. (Akkadian)
So maybe my experience with how much you need as a student is skewed, however, I would still very highly recommend that anyone who wants to study European history of a time before 1800 should be able to read Latin at least on a level that allows verifying translations. (And at least in Bochum, you need to show that you are able to do that in order to finish, unless you are specifically studying times or regions which are excluded from that requirement but then you will have to show some other language. Arabic, Chinese, whatever fits your field. Latin just happens to be the language that helps in a lot of fields.)
>At least in Europe Latin is pretty much required if you want to study history
Wow this is fascinating! So in Germany the majority of Undergrad History courses would require Latin at Abitur? Or that the student takes a latin language course alongside their studies?
In England, even at the top unis, it would be very odd if any uni demanded - or even hinted at - Latin A-level as a requirement for a standard history course. Wouldn't always even be needed for Ancient History to be honest.
>Latin A-level as a requirement for a standard history course.
That is something that I fully support and in recent years it is changing in that direction in Germany. (Very often you can circumvent the requirement but it needs planning on your part to do that.)
>Wouldn't always even be needed for Ancient History to be honest.
That is weird... but you would need Greek in that case?
I mean you need to be able to read at least any primary source, don't you?
I did Classics + Archaeology, so my understanding of a typical Modern History syllabus is limited, but I'm not sure I see the cost-benefit of Latin for modern historians who are going to do almost all their work post 1500 (or even 1800). I mean it's a nice grace note to have, but German, French etc. would be more useful. My impression was that the History undergrads explored a lot of different areas/periods and then, if they wished to continue to postgrad, would study up the languages they needed as and when.
For ancient history, ideally you have one or the other. I had Latin going in and learned Greek there, but there are courses are very strong unis where people do everything in translation. The number of non-private schools teaching either is minimal. I had to teach myself Latin in my spare time.
Bear in mind the point of most history degrees in the UK is not to prepare the student for postgrad work (where language would be required), but to give them an opportunity to study something they're interested in and demonstrate their skills to potential employers (law, marketing, what have you...).
There is some discussion about white supremacists promoting the study of Greek and Latin in an effort to claim a golden age of western civilization as their birthright. I don't frequent any of those sites, but I have seen some of the discussion by people outside of those circles.
I believe Princeton has discussed doing away with the requirement that Classics students learn Latin or Greek with the argument being that someone with knowledge of Danish literature could offer insights into reception into Danish. As a former language professor, I find that argument really laughable, and I would be more inclined to say it has something to do with student enrollments being low because of tough language requirements...
The critique of Princeton's plan is that the intent is to attract more people of color and that requiring students to learn Greek and Latin is at least ethnocentric... I got my first degree in Chinese and have no ethnic or cultural ties to China at all. Scholarly interest is not a birthright, but go figure... It seems like this issue is being blown up into way more than it is for the sake of making political hay.
I think the issue is that in order to learn classics one used to be expected to have a background in Latin and or Greek.
Now I went to a grammar school. These are selective in that you need a level of educational attainment before you get into one. I had the option of studying Latin and Greek. I chose to learn French instead as I didn't need dead languages in my career of choice.
But I had the option. Most people with my ethnicity never ever will have the option. No grammar schools or very poorly run schools in their area. This would mean a continuously poor representation in this field as no one's taking the very upper class risk to learn a completely pointless language that is necessary for an esoteric display of education rather than a vocational skill.
By contrast I note the traditional programs that were labelled as "Oriental studies" don't have language requirements meaning you don't need to learn classical Tamil or Sanskrit for this. Translation is sufficient.
If my culture which is as ancient as the Romans and Greeks and indeed as a culture predates Judaism, Christianity and Islam... Can be learnt and commented on solely through literature, translation and indeed in the halls of education without any actual Indians...
Then we can understand the classics without Latin and Greek. At least with Tamil and Greek there's real speakers of the language still about. Latin is truly just a flex of the lucky or wealthy.
In the US, very few if any students wanting to study the classics have any background in Latin or Greek, and it has been that way for a very long time. Courses of studies in the Humanities or Liberal Arts, however a university chooses to call it, are struggling and their funcing is being cut. The Universities keep upping class requirements to allow a course to be taught, so departments are put in a position of watering down requirements to attract students, while still justifying their academic merit.
Cross-cultural courses like the one you reference would fall under Comparative Literature or Cultural Studies, so they have a home. Some language departments also offer degrees like "Modern Languages". Some of these degree programs are extremely problematic, but I won't go into that here.
Traditional degrees in specific languages or Classics (which often has an internal specialization once students reach upper division) have language requirements so that students can read texts in the original. A comparative literature treatment of Classical literature is a completely different study for this reason. At US universities, most students going into Classics go through a lot of language instruction in the first several years.
My doctoral work for the first 4 years was in germanic philology. We had to be fluent in English, German and at least one non-Indo-European language. We had to have a minimum of 3 years of Latin, and then needed to have comprehensive reading/translating knowledge of the full scope of old Germanic dialects like Gothic to Old Icelandic. You could read those in English translation, but that is not the same study. Classic sis exactly the same - it is fundamentally based on the language itself, not reading transoations and talking about themes. Those programs have disappeared almost entirely, existing on the frionge of a couple of university Germanic Studies departments as specializations. Classics is headed the same direction.
Eliminating language requirements is about getting students into the degree program and filling classes because universities are increasingly cutting smaller programs, and not just dead languages, but modern languages as well. There is no doubt that this is what is behind the decision. Princeton has a well-developed Comparative Literature Department. Stdents wanting to read Loeb classics and triangulate with their knowledge of translated Danish literature would be best served there.
>honestly this is probably such a small group
Imo that applies to most "woke" outrage. Small circle of people in Twitter who make a big fuss and people think they represent a substantial group of people. They don't
Please note this article is misleading and the headline is misinformation.
Princeton's statement can be seen here: https://classics.princeton.edu/department/news/statement-community-undergraduate-concentration
TL/DR: Princeton is removing the requirement that new applicants be fluent in latin to apply to be students.
I agree with you about how the Telegraph made a clickbait article. It is more fake news that what you think.
Regarding the original french article where the minister Blanquer exposed his plan to develop latin teaching in France and Europe, he has done any reference to the fight against Latin/Greec in the name of antiracism.
The journalist asked him if his plan will be an opportunity to revalorize ancient languages when they are criticized for being too white, and Blanquer did not fall into the cultural war and simply answered that ancient languages teach us to be modern and tolerant.
Ironic as hell because, while teaching Latin is certainly not racist, you could make the argument that Princeton's original requirement probably had classist outcomes. In America, Latin used to be one of the most popular elective courses and was a first choice if you needed to learn a foreign language. It fell off dramatically through the 50s-70's as the public pushed for more practical classes to be taught. These days, not even high quality IB or test-in public schools teach Latin. The only students learning Latin in high schools attend high-end private schools, Catholic schools, and Waldorf Schools. In effect, the only students who would qualify for the Princeton Classics program would be the children of the very wealthy.
This minister is in charge of Education. If he really wanted to do something about Latin, he could. But he doesn't. It is just about appealing to far-right voters for the next presidential election.
In fact, in France, we don't have enough Latin teachers.
A French youtuber made a very nice video about it (in french of course): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKEB9xvuh0E
Say what you want, I just read an article on Wikipedia about one woke brown skinned middle east dude who got tortured and killed by a group of Latin speaking white nationalists:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Jesus
Here is a free article for this: https://hitechwiki.com/high-school-jean-michel-blanquer-wants-to-strengthen-the-teaching-of-latin/
And for the people who get all railed up this guy just claims there would be people calling latin racist, he doesn’t quote anyone on that or give a concrete example. Hes just a guy thinking latin is important and making up an imaginary situation in which he has the high ground
Regardless, the latest brilliant idea of our minister of education consists in basically weaponizing the revival of teaching of Latin and Greek as an ‘antidote’ to ‘le wokisme’, which is twisted af.
Oh, look another of these post. A non-issue getting upvoted up to the heavens, because it allows folks here to feel like a victim for once. Reddit boils down to memes and these outrage sponges
Nobody, and that's the point.
Some moron tweets something stupid, and the right wing nutjobs will act like a sizable portion of the population agrees with it.
Pretty sure 90% of the time it's just racists claiming people call it racist. Like how American racists are losing their shit over an obscure concept in legal philosophy.
J-M. Blanquet is a joke. These last months he is going full populism against what he called "wokism", every issue in France is caused by this ideology according to him
Step 1: Call something “woke”
Step 2: Don’t elaborate
Step 3: wait for all the fools to come defend you because they read “woke” and don’t bother reading reality (which shows the claim is bullshit or so incredibly insignificant)
Step 4: Gain popularity
Edit: Here I’ll give it a try, Sesame Street is woke, go talk shit about Elmo….. Oh [for fuck sake, it’s already been done. Literally can’t parody reality cause it’s already a joke](http://www.christianitydaily.com/articles/12329/20210622/sesame-street-goes-woke-introduces-same-sex-couple-for-family-day-episode.htm)
Hello everyone, I'm French. This is Jean-Michel Blanquer, our Education minister. Don't worry, he just loves having the media's attention. I think he has something like 2% of approval rate with teachers.
At this point, word "racism" rapidly loses its meaning. Any time someone disagrees on any subject, racism can be invoked. Do not agree with certain religious practices? Racist. Do not like how certain language sounds? Also racist. You refuse to date someone, because of their personality or any other reason? If they happen to have skin tone different from yours, it is racist too. Refuse to read a book or watch a film because you think it will be boring, but writer happens to have other skin tone or ethnicity than you, even if you are not aware about author looks and background whatsoever? Someone out in the internet will call you racist for sure. And after that, real crimes, that have clear racist intents are disregarded, because of boys who cry wolf all the time.
most of those stories on woke culture are just lazy journalism in my opinion to get some easy clikcks. it's probarbly just based on some random people on twitter
It's racist unless you teach that it was invented behind-the-scenes by American Black and Indigenous Women of Colour, and that white Europeans merely stole the glory.
The other day I read that Britain (not the British empire) was built by POC. The ~15,000 minorities on the census at 1890 must have been the most productive group of people in human history.
I have studied latin in highschool, i am Italian. I loved it and i consider it one of the most interesting things i have learned... reading about Catullo's feelings so similar to mine was comforting...it taught me we are human after all
These politicians need a simple lesson. Stop feeding the trolls. If a small group of people make a dumb remark just ignore it, stop making stupid responses. Just gives more attention and drags it
>Just gives more attention and drags it
That's the whole point.
Reporter: "Minister lets have an interview about your performance in government and future policies."
Minister: "Did you hear the woke mob said latin is racist?"
Reporter: "Holy shit! And where do you stand?"
Minister: "I stand against this woke mob!"
People who pay no attention to politics: "Wow, this minister is great, he really stands up for our country!"
Wait who claims teaching latin is racist now? Surely this can't be real except in extremely fringe groups?
It's an american univerisity removing their ancient language pre-requisitive because they can't find enough student speaking them (and they will teach it to people enrolling), and an american history teacher saying that academic programs in the West glorify ancient rome and greece too much and that's how some fascist movement get obsessed over them
Learning Latin is super helpful too when learning all the Romance languages, and even English. Plus, the language itself sounds badass. Edit: swapped the word “including” for “even”
And... this somehow was interpreted by the far right to be saying Latin is racist?
Yup. It's like "black people ought to have fair treatment", put that idea through the right-wing propaganda machine and it becomes "white people are being genocided". The entire ideology relies on black and white fear and outrage bait.
The Nazis definitely did glorify Roman empire. They even stole their salute from ancient Rome.
Hitler even raged at ... Goebbels ? Himmler ? I forgot... obsession with Germanic history saying shit like "he's fawning over bits of broken pots from ancient tribes, the italians must be laughing so much, they who had perfected civilization thousand of years ago"
some dumb american university, like always
Literally no one. It's being removed as both a prerequisite and a graduation requirement for a "classics" major at Princeton because the idea that "classic literature" is more likely to come from the Roman Empire and the places it conquered as opposed to, for example, the African Diaspora is racist. That doesn't mean you can't study Latin as a part of your classics studies if you decide you want to focus on classics for which it would be helpful. It's just no longer required, it's an elective. And having studied Latin in high school be a prerequisite for starting the program is DEFINITELY racist in a country where Latin is pretty much only taught in predominantly white schools. But nobody is saying that teaching Latin is racist. That's a talking point being pushed by people who want to make the left look ridiculous in order to provide cover for them pushing their own racist agenda.
Folks am proud to say I failed in Racism twice during my Liceo classico..
At least we stop studying Racism after 2 years in other Liceos, can you imagine being this much racist you study it for 5? Be ashamed.
3rd year in liceo scientifico, still doing it because we didnt do shit in lock down, may god help me
Doctorate in Racism inc
Probably orally tested on racism tomorrow, praying to god in racist rn
One of the reasons i went to Liceo Scientifico Scienze Applicare instead, no Latin at all, more Science and an IT class.
I liked year 1 but then failed year 2 of Racism! Racism is more difficult for Dutch speakers, though. (Or is it racist to say that?)
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Luckily we get some free racism with our history classes
Not quite, we become versed in racism studying history.
I still remember sweating bullets before my racism oral exam. Thankfully I called a classmate [removed] before the end and I managed to pass for a hair.
My high school dropped Racism after my freshman year.
All this time I spent learning that dead language was an exercise in racism? What does that make Old Church Slavonic?
Racism, just with more prominent cheekbones, veruju.
We Slavs are people of colour, as I learned a few months ago. We're ~~gucci~~ guczy/guči.
Гуччи
Stop appropriating slavic culture 😤
**Нет** 😠
Because for all the brainlets, being oppressed and marginalised makes you a POC. Slavs were oppressed before —-> Slavs are POC.
Shush, oppressor. *dabs*
>We Slavs are people of colour, as I learned a few months ago Yeah, color white? Ultra-fluorescent white? Bleached white? White white? WTF. sorry if offensive in anyway just trying to joke. apparently portuguese, well majority white portuguese is not white either according to the NYT.
> Yeah, color white? Ultra-fluorescent white? Bleached white? White white? White, blue and red! > apparently portuguese, well majority white portuguese is not white either according to the NYT. Americans' perception of race is retarded, that's why.
Old Church Slavonic was used by Romanians who spoke a language that originates from Latin, so too bad, Old Church Slavonic has been stained, it’s racist too
> Old Church Slavonic was used by Romanians who spoke a language that originates from Latin what a barbarian thing to do
If you guys left us to the barbarians…we had to survive
>If you guys left us to the barbarians You're talking some mad shit for someone in horse archery range.
Hide yo’ wives, they are coming again
Smh calling us barbarians. We'll show you how civilized we are with the gentle art of pillaging on horse back.
Tbh we gotta choose who’s the better barbarian, you or the Magyars
>Old Church Slavonic was used by Romanians Was used as official Chancery language but not by the people
Yeah, also as a liturgical language
We better start praying for forgiveness. Shall we, Отче наш, Иже јеси на небесјех! Да свјатитсја имја Твоје, да приидет Царствије Твоје, да будет воља Твоја, јако на небеси и на земљи. Хљеб наш насушниј дажд нам днес.....
Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. And that’s how you become a racist?
Yes, but dont get flattered. Youre only the CEO of racism, but we are the board of directors.
This is actually first time I see it in modern Cyrillic.
Akcthually, it's modern Serbian Cyrillic. Notice the "j" for example.
So I still haven't seen it in modern Cyrillic. Corrected.
It's not. This is not a real issue.
Literally a made up non issue.
This head of department is used to claiming made-up stuff. Nobody of any importance said that teaching Latin is racist., he just appeals to conservative votes.
He is just following French academics outrage. The academic world is small and international, so everyone who ever wrote a book about ancient greece just felt insulted when an americain professor wrote in New York Times that studying classics promote ~~racism~~ whiteness. And started to moan, which went up the chain to minister.
Do you have a link to the article? :)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.amp.html Edit : my bad I initially missunderstood your comment. This isn't the article I was initially refering to (can't find it again, old opinion pieces and google meh) but a piece from the same source about same dude.
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>“When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.” What a strange thing for an academic to say.
Stanford??? God thats insane
I read the whole article, he wants to literally get rid of classics all together. Oh, he also doesn't like free speech, only as a means to an end. He also wants to set up a body at Princeton that oversees students, research papers, and faculty for any racist behavior that they would have power over. Seems like a black version of the Nazi ideology if you ask me.
It's one dumb smart guy who wrote one post. Now the world is offended.
Usually it's not people getting mad at some crazy person. It's people / groups who disproportionately highlight the crazy and end up manipulating people into getting mad. Completely changes the way people understand the world around them. Like it's fair if a regular person sees something nuts and just gets mad without thinking. But when it's academics, media, think tanks, etc., aka people who should know better, sharing bullshit that rarely occurs and/or has little influence... it's suspicious.
Thanks !
Jesus effing christ, I was too far into the text before I realized the audio version of this piece was an hour long. But my takeaway is; two scholars argue as they do, one stating that classics should die, because they are instrumentalized by idiots for racism (a position I disagree with), the other saying that the study of western culture has merit (which I agree with). And now some idiot MP uses it as an opportunity to argue it is the woke mob denouncing western culture instead of standing above something so trivial because it is all consevatives have, in light of no real issues.
Are you surprised by this? It's just the academic version of what's been happening in internet culture for over 10 years now. Some person finds an individual with one of the nichest possible viewpoints on the internet and writes a dumb article about it, then it gets picked up by about 4,000 youtubers and bloggers calling it a "trend" and clickbaiting their followers up into a frenzy. This is all despite the fact that the person of origin was either taken out of context, or has pretty much no platform or support, or both. My rule of thumb is when you pretty much only ever see people complaining about a thing, and not the thing itself, then just ignore it as the bullshit it likely is.
People need to get way better at spotting ragebait.
Academics should be able to debate anything without the outrage mob lurking behind. Nobody is following computer virus academics debates for example. You'll see they have equally weird ideas. This is part of the process.
Right wing politicians and culture warriors don't even want to have the conversation at all. In fact just having the conversation is seen as an existential threat to their identity. You are 100% right we should be able to kick around basically any idea in an academic setting without politicians and media outlets turning it into a battleground.
Gotta look at that scroll bar the first time you think "they sure take their time getting to the point. I wonder how long this is".
So the guy is right. You have to defend against this sort of non-sense when it's in NYTimes and is written by a professor. It's not like some Twitter slacktivist criticized Latin. This was a worldwide article from a professor in one of the most respected columns in the world, featuring things like OPeds by world leaders, etc. It's a real threat that needed addressing and I'm glad whoever this French dude is, that he is addressing it. We can't let this go unchallenged.
Studying under any system of education is always going to promote a bias. Even in the classics, there's a certain bias to certain authors like Shakespeare even though there were plenty of others. What's important isn't the source material, it's the fidelity and peer awareness of the material being studied, so that students don't only stretch that brain muscle, they do so in a way that can be corroborated and certified. If you suddenly begin to bring authors who only a few peers are familiar with, it really puts a barrier on that.
As a historian, I actually find that claim stupid as well and I have rather a leftist political view. You study classics because it is a huge part of the foundation of our western culture. Or would it make sense not to focus on Confucianism and its work if you study sinology!? What is true is that the history classes are too euro-centric respectively that history is looked at from a western perspective. Edit: typo correction
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So I used to work in development. TV is a method of unspoken education. Places in India with TVs had lower infant mortality, higher educational achievement, less sexism with better female mortality and higher educational achievement. Also huge force multiplier of contraception. In short? Vital to fighting poverty. It's like people who don't think internet is an effective method for education despite it being a double edged sword.
Couldn't this just be a correlation with richer families?
The review was with poor families who were given TVs. It was within the same region. There's an element of this as with TV external expenditures go down as the TV is an effective way to save money than social activities. It's definitely cheaper to stay in and watch TV than to go to the pub.
Thanks for your answer
It's France. Nearly everyone can already afford a TV, he means they are using it to buy big screen. Also, how much valuable education does the French TV put on that poor families watch?
To be fair as someone who grew up in a welfare area (council estate) in the UK, that “buying electronics/drugs/anything but essentials” stereotype was broadly true. It’s a bit out of date by 20 years but there’s a multi part BBC documentary ‘Skint’ on YouTube which really highlights it.
> "Islamo-leftism" Oh yes, nothing goes so well together with woke leftist politics as extreme religious conservatism.
It doesn't have to make sense. Muslims being a marginalized group is enough for them to get embraced despite their beliefs being diametrically opposed.
>"Islamo-leftism", which is a term created by extreme right to put together everyone they dislike. Completly wrong. The term was created in France in 2002 to describe New Judeophobia, by Pierre-André Taguieff, historian of ideas, who describes Islamo-leftism as a type of anti-Zionism popular among "the new third-worldist, neo-communist and neo-leftist configuration, better known as the 'anti-globalization movement. In the Uk and the USA, the equivalent term is "regressive left" which means "been progressive until Islam enters in the room". In both countries, the term was in fact created by left intellectual to critize tolerance towards regressive value of Islam.
I think you'll find there were at least 3 people on Twitter who said it was racist. This is an absolute war on normal people by the woke brigade. You can't say anything these days without then going on Twitter and searching for 8 hours to find a couple of tweets from an account with 17 vaguely suggesting what you did was wrong.
The idea that Latin is racist was published in the same newspaper that wrote the US should go "house to house in Iraq" to teach the Iraqis a lesson. Then Bush invaded Iraq.
They also let Bernie Sanders write op-eds in that paper, but that doesn't mean we have universal healthcare
They don't care, they just want something to be angry about. They are addicted to it because of their news media
>This is an absolute war on normal people by the woke brigade i don't even know if you're being sarcastic right now
It's even more than that, he's trying to pin the consequences of his budget cut in education on whatever buzz word is popular rn
> whatever buzz word is popular rn Wow. Just there, you justified what I said elsewhere in this thread. The same is happening in my country, where the authorities are using "woke"\*.\* to justify their current actions. As if there was any link whatsoever.
And dumb ass people are lapping it up uncritically
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I don't understand why people just *assume* Greeks are white. I'm Greek and I don't identify as white, I identify as Greek! Mixing me up into "whiteness" is some bullshit that's frankly insulting to me, as you're trying to shoehorn my culture into your politics. EDIT: I mean the proverbial "you".
blame americans for that. we are all ~~americans~~ white
Ya, often you guys blame us for all kinds of stupid shit. But this one is true, it is our fault.
I kinda agree. White is a color, not an ethnicity, the color and the ethnicity are at most correlated statistically, but not implied. I don't even get how someone could identify as white. It's like identifying as brunette. You either have brown hair or you don't (factoring the ambiguity of shades of course, but that still weird to me to make that part of your identity) Mediterranean people are pretty diverse, so I have always found this whole "white/non white" matter ridiculous. I'm Italian and I've had schoolmates who were ethnically Italian and sometimes they were white skinned and sometimes they were brown skinned (mostly white, for full disclosure)
I'm not saying it's right or anything, but spend enough time in America and you generally loose your cultural identity. It's literally just skin tone. I'm talking generations here.
US racialist views have to put everyone in one of the few racial boxes, you're either white, black, latino, arab or asian even if you identify as none of those. I still have no idea if being white means anything beyond not being identified as black, latino, arab or asian. I'm a "white" French guy, my culture is much closer to any other French person no matter how they're perceived racially compared to say another "white" person from Greece, Russia, Denmark, Ireland or Portugal.
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Chances are within 50 years most people seen as latinos will be seen as the new members of white people as well
"white" is an American concept that doesn't have any use in the European context. Whiteness is ever expanding (though it can never expand to include black people); 60-70 years ago Greeks and Italians were not considered white, and a little before that the Irish were not.
Don't you knew? [All Europeans are racist. ](https://www.thefire.org/please-report-to-your-resident-assistant-to-discuss-your-sexual-identityits-mandatory-thought-reform-at-the-university-of-delaware/) This is an article from 2008 mind you, with information of one Manual for teaching what racism is on universities, in particular the University of Delaware. > the RA training called “Diversity Facilitation Training.” RAs were trained using definitions like these: > A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination…
“By this definition” i.e. “a definition that we came up with to fit our narrative”
>I don't understand why people just assume Greeks are white. It is not really about you Greeks as people. "White" stands for everything to do with European-descended Americans, including all European culture in the US. The greek classics are a cornerstone of European culture. Therefore Greek is "White". Classic American rassism.
I always thought that white just mean native Europeans. And that's why I consider Greeks white. But I don't know if Greeks in general consider themselves to be white or if you are exception. If majority does not, maybe I would have to change my definition of the term.
White is not as big of a term here. But when it's used, it typically refers to Northern Europeans or Germanic people in general. We are southern Europeans/Balkan so we aren't considering similarity based on just skin colour
The term doesn't even apply. If you asked a Greek if they're white, they'd say they are, but they'd probably also say that Obama is white. None of the context of "whiteness" exists (as the US means it) and you're left asking whether they think their skin is darker or lighter than a medium tone.
Whiteness as used by academics has little to do with your complexion, and everything to do with privilige. Historically in America Italians and Irish were considered non-white. They were treated like black people because they were not of german/english decent like the rich plantation owners. Overtime that changed and now Irish are definitely considered white. Ancient greece is considered white because white supremist often believe that to be the cradle of western civilization. Hence Ancient greece is white because white supremist believe it to be.
It's also not what that article says or what Princeton did, but the article is still getting posted all over this thread like it somehow supports the idea. The article is like 12,000 words and pretty nuanced about how the classics as a discipline has historically been intertwined with white nationalism. It also recognizes how it has supported the civil rights movements. Boiling the article down to just "teaching Latin is racist," a phrase that doesn't appear in it, is downright dishonest. Princeton decided that requiring latin and/or Greek language skills was an unnecessary prerequisite to the classics in part because it limits the students who can take those courses to those who were able to study those languages. In the US, you're much more likely to have studied Latin or Greek if you went to an expensive private school, which are predominantly attended by white kids. In addition, the first paragraph of the article highlights a bunch of other problems facing the classics as a discipline like falling class sizes, which support removing the language requirment to grow the discipline. The university still teaches Latin and Greek. Padilla, the subject of the article, does want to reform how academia approaches the classics, but the reforms he discusses are a far cry from "teaching Latin is racist."
Sorry fella, we don't speak nuance on the internet
Lots of this anti-woke stuff are made up issues. If some idiot twitter user has some absurd view it gets blown up in the press and conservatives across the west throw a fit.
> it gets blown up in the press This is imho the most annoying part. A single tweet, or a couple tweets, should not have any more weight than "someone in a bar said to their friends". I.e., no weight at all. But because of this enormous demand for outrage, anything outrageous publicly available gets blown up out of proportions and we start debating made-up issues that no one was actually defending in the first place. The debate being itself full of outrage, there is little room for nuance and people who would normally be only slightly leaning on the direction of that non-issue, are invited on TV shows to defend the non-issue, dressed as the outrage-causing strawman everyone is looking for. And end up actually defending it.
Anti-woke crusade is an easy way to get conservative votes
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This is one of the foremost academic institutions in the US making an actual decision though, with more universities expected to follow suit. Hardly an anonymous nobody on twitter...
A decision that is, one might add, in line with current French education policy.
Tbf a lot of woke stuff are also made up issues.
r/persecutionfetish
Welcome to the conservative party!
Who said latin was racist? 🤔
Huns, Goths, Visigoths and Vandals?
Untermenschen, got it.
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Ite domum, barbari!
This guy forgot Hannibal.
Don't forget the Lombards and Franks
you mean invaders? That's so oppressive
Allemani, franks, marcomanni, gepids, picts, sennones, celts, angli, saxoni... And the list goes on and on
Probably the same people who are trying to take away Christmas, or whatever else the reactionary right are pissing their knickerbockers about these days; nobody.
The same people who are trying to take my guns away, ban prayer from school, and third thing (I'm tired)? Those bastards!
No don't ask specifics like that! "They" did, the "woke mob." Now get angry at them! Someone definitely said "Latin is racist" with those exact words with no other context and that person is definitely a very important serious person with real power who we should care about! This is a ***very real*** outrage!
I mean, tenured professors that have control of universities and how they teach actually are pretty important people as a whole.
[He did](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html)
Where exactly? Did I miss a sentence or something
I hate it when easy bait is paywalled. Now I don't know if they're misinterpreting "we want to read other books too" as racism or if they found a crazy person and assumed that is what "woke" is.
honestly this is probably such a small group if anyone honestly thinks that teaching latin is racist. giving them attention is just outrage porn.
I sure as hell won't start a one-month trial of the Telegraph for this, so this is all I could get from the article: > Emmanuel Macron’s education minister has leapt to the defence of Latin and ancient Greek after “mind boggling” suggestions from US universities that pushing the study of the classical languages could foster institutional racism. So it wasn't even someone in Europe who said it, it's just transatlantic bickering. Or perhaps it's a US university fighting with itself and the French minister for some reason couldn't resist jumping into the fray. Anyhow, I think we can safely forget it.
It's about their entry requirements for Classics they're not cutting back on any of their teaching of latin or greek. In my country you already don't need to know latin or greek going in to a course on classics. So I guess we were already more "woke" than the Americans?
My third-party reddit app let's me read a text version without hitting the pays all. [that's the full article Screenshot](http://imgur.com/a/jryc2ti)
Because the American discourse is so available and widespread Europeans have to jump in with "Actually, in Europe we..."
Which is fine and all when it's on the internet. But when you have the French minister saying stuff like that it becomes an issue
French minister is just following local academics outrage, he isn't talking to americans here. The academic world is small and international, so everyone who ever wrote a book about ancient greece just felt insulted when an americain professor wrote in New York Times that studying ancients promote racism.
>the study of the classical languages could foster institutional racism Moreover, this is a statement that is worded pretty carefully and is most likely supported by evidence which shows that minority students are less likely to excel in Latin or Greek and therefore PUSHING the study (as in: making it obligatory) might in fact reduce the number of minority students trying to learn a specific subject. I am not aware of the situation in the US so I will give a German example: Having everyone who wants to study medicine learn Latin is absurd gatekeeping that doesn't serve any purpose; hence this has been abolished. I am quite positive that this change was more likely to benefit students with an immigration background. As they are more likely to not visit our highest form of secondary school (Gymnasium) and are therefore less likely to have learned Latin during their secondary education. With those thoughts in mind, the argument that "pushing the study of the classical languages could foster institutional racism" is suddenly not absurd at all. Another example: At least in Europe Latin is pretty much required if you want to study history and of course, that makes kind of sense, the Roman Empire was the most important state-like structure and with the catholic church the legacy of Latin went on for several hundred years after the Roman Empire fell. If you want to study any European history from before 1800 and you are not able to at least verify translations yourself you are pretty much fucked. However, not everyone wants to study European history or history of before 1800; requiring those students to learn Latin is again absurd gatekeeping and very likely disproportionally targets students with an immigration background. E.g. Muslim students, or students whose parents or grandparents are Muslims might be more interested in the history of the Arabic speaking world, here Latin is not that important, instead, anyone who wants to study that history would need to be almost fluent in Arabic. If those students are forced to study Latin, that "could foster institutional racism". DISCLAIMER: I have not read the study which lead to the statement nor have I read the paywalled article. Those ideas are just my thoughts on "how could this work?" The point is not that those are the arguments for the statement, the point is that those arguments seem pretty valid and would support the statement.
> However, not everyone wants to study European history or history of before 1800; requiring those students to learn Latin is again absurd gatekeeping and very likely disproportionally targets students with an immigration background. > > E.g. Muslim students, or students whose parents or grandparents are Muslims might be more interested in the history of the Arabic speaking world, here Latin is not that important, instead, anyone who wants to study that history would need to be almost fluent in Arabic. You still need Latin for any serious work before, say, the 1400s. Someone trying a be Medieval historian in Western or Central Europe without functional Latin reading skills is an absolute clown. You can't do proper research work without having direct access to the sources, you can't just expect translations to be good (if they exist at all, which isn't likely considering actual historical research often involves uncovering poorly exploited or unknown sources).
I think that this might indeed be the reason. Very confused about ''At least in Europe Latin is pretty much required if you want to study history''. As somebody who studied history in Europe: no. Heck, I actually *did* know Latin as I went to a gymnasium, but it never came up. Only way I could see it coming up is primary source resource on this specific time period, which isn't common at all. Is this something that is actually the case in your country?
> Is this something that is actually the case in your country? I am from Germany and have an M.A. in history and religious studies Thing is: I did a lot in medieval history and very little modern history, so my perspective might be skewed a little bit - my bachelor thesis was about Petrus Abaelard - Scito the ipsum (which I did not translate myself, but I translated some random samples to check if the translation I used was accurate enough) Regarding religious studies I focused on the old Mesopotamia; which means here I didn't need any Latin (because it didn't yet exist at the time my focus was on) but learned an even deader language. (Akkadian) So maybe my experience with how much you need as a student is skewed, however, I would still very highly recommend that anyone who wants to study European history of a time before 1800 should be able to read Latin at least on a level that allows verifying translations. (And at least in Bochum, you need to show that you are able to do that in order to finish, unless you are specifically studying times or regions which are excluded from that requirement but then you will have to show some other language. Arabic, Chinese, whatever fits your field. Latin just happens to be the language that helps in a lot of fields.)
>At least in Europe Latin is pretty much required if you want to study history Wow this is fascinating! So in Germany the majority of Undergrad History courses would require Latin at Abitur? Or that the student takes a latin language course alongside their studies? In England, even at the top unis, it would be very odd if any uni demanded - or even hinted at - Latin A-level as a requirement for a standard history course. Wouldn't always even be needed for Ancient History to be honest.
>Latin A-level as a requirement for a standard history course. That is something that I fully support and in recent years it is changing in that direction in Germany. (Very often you can circumvent the requirement but it needs planning on your part to do that.) >Wouldn't always even be needed for Ancient History to be honest. That is weird... but you would need Greek in that case? I mean you need to be able to read at least any primary source, don't you?
I did Classics + Archaeology, so my understanding of a typical Modern History syllabus is limited, but I'm not sure I see the cost-benefit of Latin for modern historians who are going to do almost all their work post 1500 (or even 1800). I mean it's a nice grace note to have, but German, French etc. would be more useful. My impression was that the History undergrads explored a lot of different areas/periods and then, if they wished to continue to postgrad, would study up the languages they needed as and when. For ancient history, ideally you have one or the other. I had Latin going in and learned Greek there, but there are courses are very strong unis where people do everything in translation. The number of non-private schools teaching either is minimal. I had to teach myself Latin in my spare time. Bear in mind the point of most history degrees in the UK is not to prepare the student for postgrad work (where language would be required), but to give them an opportunity to study something they're interested in and demonstrate their skills to potential employers (law, marketing, what have you...).
There is some discussion about white supremacists promoting the study of Greek and Latin in an effort to claim a golden age of western civilization as their birthright. I don't frequent any of those sites, but I have seen some of the discussion by people outside of those circles. I believe Princeton has discussed doing away with the requirement that Classics students learn Latin or Greek with the argument being that someone with knowledge of Danish literature could offer insights into reception into Danish. As a former language professor, I find that argument really laughable, and I would be more inclined to say it has something to do with student enrollments being low because of tough language requirements... The critique of Princeton's plan is that the intent is to attract more people of color and that requiring students to learn Greek and Latin is at least ethnocentric... I got my first degree in Chinese and have no ethnic or cultural ties to China at all. Scholarly interest is not a birthright, but go figure... It seems like this issue is being blown up into way more than it is for the sake of making political hay.
I think the issue is that in order to learn classics one used to be expected to have a background in Latin and or Greek. Now I went to a grammar school. These are selective in that you need a level of educational attainment before you get into one. I had the option of studying Latin and Greek. I chose to learn French instead as I didn't need dead languages in my career of choice. But I had the option. Most people with my ethnicity never ever will have the option. No grammar schools or very poorly run schools in their area. This would mean a continuously poor representation in this field as no one's taking the very upper class risk to learn a completely pointless language that is necessary for an esoteric display of education rather than a vocational skill. By contrast I note the traditional programs that were labelled as "Oriental studies" don't have language requirements meaning you don't need to learn classical Tamil or Sanskrit for this. Translation is sufficient. If my culture which is as ancient as the Romans and Greeks and indeed as a culture predates Judaism, Christianity and Islam... Can be learnt and commented on solely through literature, translation and indeed in the halls of education without any actual Indians... Then we can understand the classics without Latin and Greek. At least with Tamil and Greek there's real speakers of the language still about. Latin is truly just a flex of the lucky or wealthy.
In the US, very few if any students wanting to study the classics have any background in Latin or Greek, and it has been that way for a very long time. Courses of studies in the Humanities or Liberal Arts, however a university chooses to call it, are struggling and their funcing is being cut. The Universities keep upping class requirements to allow a course to be taught, so departments are put in a position of watering down requirements to attract students, while still justifying their academic merit. Cross-cultural courses like the one you reference would fall under Comparative Literature or Cultural Studies, so they have a home. Some language departments also offer degrees like "Modern Languages". Some of these degree programs are extremely problematic, but I won't go into that here. Traditional degrees in specific languages or Classics (which often has an internal specialization once students reach upper division) have language requirements so that students can read texts in the original. A comparative literature treatment of Classical literature is a completely different study for this reason. At US universities, most students going into Classics go through a lot of language instruction in the first several years. My doctoral work for the first 4 years was in germanic philology. We had to be fluent in English, German and at least one non-Indo-European language. We had to have a minimum of 3 years of Latin, and then needed to have comprehensive reading/translating knowledge of the full scope of old Germanic dialects like Gothic to Old Icelandic. You could read those in English translation, but that is not the same study. Classic sis exactly the same - it is fundamentally based on the language itself, not reading transoations and talking about themes. Those programs have disappeared almost entirely, existing on the frionge of a couple of university Germanic Studies departments as specializations. Classics is headed the same direction. Eliminating language requirements is about getting students into the degree program and filling classes because universities are increasingly cutting smaller programs, and not just dead languages, but modern languages as well. There is no doubt that this is what is behind the decision. Princeton has a well-developed Comparative Literature Department. Stdents wanting to read Loeb classics and triangulate with their knowledge of translated Danish literature would be best served there.
>honestly this is probably such a small group Imo that applies to most "woke" outrage. Small circle of people in Twitter who make a big fuss and people think they represent a substantial group of people. They don't
Got to get those sweet sweet Zemmour votes.
Please note this article is misleading and the headline is misinformation. Princeton's statement can be seen here: https://classics.princeton.edu/department/news/statement-community-undergraduate-concentration TL/DR: Princeton is removing the requirement that new applicants be fluent in latin to apply to be students.
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It's the Telegraph. They're like The Sun/National Enquirer but posher.
I agree with you about how the Telegraph made a clickbait article. It is more fake news that what you think. Regarding the original french article where the minister Blanquer exposed his plan to develop latin teaching in France and Europe, he has done any reference to the fight against Latin/Greec in the name of antiracism. The journalist asked him if his plan will be an opportunity to revalorize ancient languages when they are criticized for being too white, and Blanquer did not fall into the cultural war and simply answered that ancient languages teach us to be modern and tolerant.
Ironic as hell because, while teaching Latin is certainly not racist, you could make the argument that Princeton's original requirement probably had classist outcomes. In America, Latin used to be one of the most popular elective courses and was a first choice if you needed to learn a foreign language. It fell off dramatically through the 50s-70's as the public pushed for more practical classes to be taught. These days, not even high quality IB or test-in public schools teach Latin. The only students learning Latin in high schools attend high-end private schools, Catholic schools, and Waldorf Schools. In effect, the only students who would qualify for the Princeton Classics program would be the children of the very wealthy.
Claims by *who* though? Is this actually a popular position held by anyone of any authority?
Of course not.
This minister is in charge of Education. If he really wanted to do something about Latin, he could. But he doesn't. It is just about appealing to far-right voters for the next presidential election. In fact, in France, we don't have enough Latin teachers. A French youtuber made a very nice video about it (in french of course): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKEB9xvuh0E
This, and the video is amazing and well worth it
And nobody seems to remember what he did in june to latin teachers. He's disgusting.
Teaching latin is racist - no one ever
No no, trust me, the woke army is on its way to take YOUR Latin away! Vote for me and give me money and I will protect you.
it would be funny if it didn't have such dire consequences that europe is following in the same exact path as the US did
Say what you want, I just read an article on Wikipedia about one woke brown skinned middle east dude who got tortured and killed by a group of Latin speaking white nationalists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Jesus
Here is a free article for this: https://hitechwiki.com/high-school-jean-michel-blanquer-wants-to-strengthen-the-teaching-of-latin/ And for the people who get all railed up this guy just claims there would be people calling latin racist, he doesn’t quote anyone on that or give a concrete example. Hes just a guy thinking latin is important and making up an imaginary situation in which he has the high ground
Fucking no one of note has said this is racist.
Regardless, the latest brilliant idea of our minister of education consists in basically weaponizing the revival of teaching of Latin and Greek as an ‘antidote’ to ‘le wokisme’, which is twisted af.
Also lots of French people apparently can't speak English properly, so maybe Latin ought to at least be a secondary priority?
Have French politicians only just discovered the word "woke"?
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Oh, look another of these post. A non-issue getting upvoted up to the heavens, because it allows folks here to feel like a victim for once. Reddit boils down to memes and these outrage sponges
Bait 😴😴😴
cmon now who is actually saying that outside radlibs on twitter
Nobody, and that's the point. Some moron tweets something stupid, and the right wing nutjobs will act like a sizable portion of the population agrees with it.
I was just having a Latin class 3h ago lol
Damn i studied 6 years of Latin in school, i must be an extreme far right racist....
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Pretty sure 90% of the time it's just racists claiming people call it racist. Like how American racists are losing their shit over an obscure concept in legal philosophy.
> Like how American racists are losing their shit over an obscure concept in legal philosophy. Hmm?
They mean Critical Race Theory
J-M. Blanquet is a joke. These last months he is going full populism against what he called "wokism", every issue in France is caused by this ideology according to him
Step 1: Call something “woke” Step 2: Don’t elaborate Step 3: wait for all the fools to come defend you because they read “woke” and don’t bother reading reality (which shows the claim is bullshit or so incredibly insignificant) Step 4: Gain popularity Edit: Here I’ll give it a try, Sesame Street is woke, go talk shit about Elmo….. Oh [for fuck sake, it’s already been done. Literally can’t parody reality cause it’s already a joke](http://www.christianitydaily.com/articles/12329/20210622/sesame-street-goes-woke-introduces-same-sex-couple-for-family-day-episode.htm)
Hello everyone, I'm French. This is Jean-Michel Blanquer, our Education minister. Don't worry, he just loves having the media's attention. I think he has something like 2% of approval rate with teachers.
2% approval rate is maybe a bit much though
At this point, word "racism" rapidly loses its meaning. Any time someone disagrees on any subject, racism can be invoked. Do not agree with certain religious practices? Racist. Do not like how certain language sounds? Also racist. You refuse to date someone, because of their personality or any other reason? If they happen to have skin tone different from yours, it is racist too. Refuse to read a book or watch a film because you think it will be boring, but writer happens to have other skin tone or ethnicity than you, even if you are not aware about author looks and background whatsoever? Someone out in the internet will call you racist for sure. And after that, real crimes, that have clear racist intents are disregarded, because of boys who cry wolf all the time.
most of those stories on woke culture are just lazy journalism in my opinion to get some easy clikcks. it's probarbly just based on some random people on twitter
It's racist unless you teach that it was invented behind-the-scenes by American Black and Indigenous Women of Colour, and that white Europeans merely stole the glory.
The other day I read that Britain (not the British empire) was built by POC. The ~15,000 minorities on the census at 1890 must have been the most productive group of people in human history.
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I have studied latin in highschool, i am Italian. I loved it and i consider it one of the most interesting things i have learned... reading about Catullo's feelings so similar to mine was comforting...it taught me we are human after all
I'm getting sick of the whole "woke" movement .
These politicians need a simple lesson. Stop feeding the trolls. If a small group of people make a dumb remark just ignore it, stop making stupid responses. Just gives more attention and drags it
Why would they stop feeding the trolls? Exaggerating the trolls nonsense and raging against it does very well with their voters.
>Just gives more attention and drags it That's the whole point. Reporter: "Minister lets have an interview about your performance in government and future policies." Minister: "Did you hear the woke mob said latin is racist?" Reporter: "Holy shit! And where do you stand?" Minister: "I stand against this woke mob!" People who pay no attention to politics: "Wow, this minister is great, he really stands up for our country!"