Should Latin Be Taught in VCE?

Introduction:

On the 31st of May 2021, I returned to Haileybury College, from which I had graduated four years prior, as a member of staff. I was now the new Latin Teaching Assistant and virtually scurrying from break-out room to break-out room to introduce myself. After the basic niceties had been exchanged, I asked each group of students what I considered to be a fairly important question: Why Latin? One of the most time-intensive subjects on the VCE roster, I assumed that no sane student would take up the subject without a good reason. And, without exception, I received some variation on the same theme: ‘Because it scales well’, with the optional addition of: ‘and I need a good ATAR to get into med’.

Ask not a question to which you are not prepared to hear an honest answer. Such a unanimous chorus disappointed the optimistic Latin-lover inside me, but I couldn’t pretend to be surprised. After all, I had gone through the same program at the same school not five years earlier and I had always known that I was the only person in my cohort who intended to pursue the subject beyond the lucrative scaling of 3/4 Latin. And as a perverted ‘cash cow’ for ATAR points, none of my peers were disappointed with the time they had poured into learning conjugations, the various uses of the subjunctive mood and how to scan dactylic hexameter.

When it came to results day in 2017, out of our class of 13 students, two scored perfect scores of 99.95, six scored ATARs over 99 and everyone else in the class was comfortably above 95. This wasn’t limited to the Latin cohort either. Haileybury Girls College had 54% of its graduates score in the top ten percent of the state in the same year. Haileybury Boys College was not far behind with 43% of graduates scoring in the top ten percent. Overall, 91% of students received ATARs placing them in the top 40% of the state and had 8.1% place in the top 1% of the state.

These figures, taken from just one of the many elite private schools in Victoria, highlights a clear overrepresentation of private school students graduating with ATARs in the highest percentiles. The equitability of the VCE program has been the subject of much debate since it was first instituted in 1987 and in order to form a comprehensive viewpoint, there are a multitude of external factors that must be taken into account. This essay will explore a relatively small but nevertheless important aspect of this problem: the promotion and to some extent exploitation of niche, high-scaling subjects by private schools to increase students’ ATAR scores.

The Importance of Teaching Latin at a Secondary Level, Or Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater:

Although not the only VCE subject that falls into the above category, Latin – a language already associated with the buttressing of patriarchy, Eurocentrism and social elitism – is a compelling example to call on. While the educational benefits of studying a second language are well documented (Marian & Shook, 2012. Ortega, 2014), classicists must then justify why students should learn a ‘dead’ language over more popular choices like Mandarin, French or Japanese. Thus, it is necessary to examine whether Latin has inherent value as a subject outside of the VCE context.

A more thorough extolment of Latin can be found in Howell’s The Importance of Latin in the High-School Curriculum (1932); however, I will recount the three most common themes used to defend Latin’s validity as a subject. Firstly, Latin is a foundational language descended from Proto-Indo-European. It is the root of all Romance languages and has several key similarities to Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages. Thus, when viewing Latin as a LOTE subject, it should be seen as a building block from which to facilitate multilingualism rather than an end in and of itself. However, having a greater understanding of Latin can also help students become more adept at English by solidifying key grammatical and linguistic concepts.

Another significant benefit of learning Latin is its rigorous workload, which often challenges students in different ways from other LOTE subjects. For example, Latin students are expected to do a certain amount of rote learning in order to memorise conjugations, declensions and vocabulary. The ability to parse and translate words proficiently draws on a student’s short- and long-term memory. Yet once a student has progressed to a higher level, they will encounter idiomatic expressions and other nuances that will require a separate set of skills to translate. Hence, true mastery of Latin necessitates that a student engages with multiple facets of intelligence from memory-recall and logic driven reasoning to comprehension, cultural understanding and critical interpretation of text.

Finally, although Latin is no longer spoken outside of ecclesiastic institutions, it was the lingua franca of Europe from the Roman Empire until well into the 18th century. Consequently, Latin is not merely a language needed to access primary sources written during the Classical period but almost any scholarly text from Medieval Europe to the Enlightenment. These texts form the bedrock of the so-called ‘Western canon’ and contain the roots of modern Western philosophy, politics, science, literature and much more. Translations of such seminal works abound but suffer from a translator’s own socio-political context and agenda and should never be taken as a viable substitute for reading the original text.

The Root Issue: A Problem of Scaling or Accessibility?

If, as I have argued in the previous paragraphs, it would be pedagogically unconscionable to simply remove subjects that amplify inequity in the VCE program, then we must search for the root issue. Many have been quick to point to scaling as the source of prejudice within the system, favouring subjects primarily taken by private school students while penalising VCE vocational education and training (VET) and other VCE subjects associated with students in lower socio-economic districts.

At a glance, the numbers seem damning for VTAC’s scaling methods. According to VTAC’s ATAR and Scaling Guide (2020), each student’s study scores as determined by the VCAA are scaled to ensure “fair comparison for students’ achievements across all their [subjects]”. But despite their insistence that scaling is used to protect impartiality and several attempts to convince students not to enrol in subjects because they are perceived to ‘scale well’, the 2017 Scaling Report highlights some clear disparities between subjects.

The mean scaled score for Latin in 2017 was 45, by far the highest average out of all the VCE subjects with the closest mean scores being Chinese as a Second Language with 40.4, Specialist Mathematics with 40.3 and French with 40.3. It should be noted that these top four subjects are all affected by additional scaling rules designed to encourage students to take a second language or compensate for the different levels of mathematics on offer. Meanwhile, the subject with the lowest mean scaled score was Industry and Enterprise with only 22.5. The only VET subject to rise above a mean of 30 was Laboratory Skills with 30.8 and 53% of VET subjects had a mean scaled score of 25 or lower.

Theoretically, a student who took Latin, Industry and Enterprise, VET Laboratory Skills and VET Hospitality (Kitchen Operations) (with a scaled mean of 25.4) in 2017 and scored a raw study score of 30 in each subject, would be left with scaled scores of 46, 20, 31 and 24 respectively. The results emphasise a stark contrast that some have attributed to VTAC making a value judgement that old-school, prestigious Latin is inherently more difficult than Laboratory Skills or Kitchen Operations. However, this would be to misunderstand how VTAC carries out their scaling and the true problem creating the disparity within these students scaled scores.

The VCAA is responsible for generating a study score that places all students who complete Latin Units 3/4 on a bell curve with 30 as their mean. Then VTAC cross-references the performance of each Latin student against that student’s performance against the state cohort as a whole. Consequently, how well Latin scales in a given year is a reflection of how well Latin students perform in all of their subjects other than Latin. This leads to a dangerous implication that the average Latin student is simply more intelligent than non-Latin students, which is unequivocally false.

In reality, it is the size of the Latin cohort that creates this artificial inflation. In 2018, there were 224 students enrolled at a VCE level, with a slight increase in 2019 to 248 students. For context, this represents 0.5% of students in a state cohort where over 60,000 students complete VCE each year. In other words, Latin does not have enough students to reach the critical mass at which VTAC’s scaling method is most effective. However, this does not diminish the fact that private schools have been exploiting Latin’s uniquely high scaling to their own advantage.

This in turn leads us to the root of inequity within VCE Latin, its exclusivity. Only three government schools have a Latin program available for students: Dandenong High School, Suzanne Cory High School and University High School. On the other hand, there are at least sixteen different private schools offering Latin at a VCE level to their students six of which (Melbourne Grammar, Melbourne Girls Grammar, Scotch, Camberwell Grammar School, Haileybury College, Haileybury Girls College) are in the top fifteen most expensive private schools in Melbourne. In this way, taking Latin at a VCE level – either out of passion for the language or to boost their potential ATAR – is not an option that is accessible for most students attending a public school. Herein lies the true inequity at the heart of Latin.

Possible Solutions:

In a 2016 journal article, Zhao argues that the ‘achievement gap’ between students of different socio-economic and racial backgrounds is symptomatic of an educational system that relies on the existence of academic inadequacy. That is, a system that needs to have ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ will always perpetuate historic inequity for students from underprivileged backgrounds. VCE and the ATAR are undeniable examples of such a system. In order to have students who score over 45 on their subjects and receive a 99+ ATAR, there must by definition be a student who scores the dreaded ‘less than 25’ for their subjects or an ATAR ‘less than 30’.

Zhao asks to what extent change can be accomplished within an educational paradigm obsessed with measuring student deficit at the cost of overlooking their core strengths and concludes that the only path to meaningful change must be through a radical pedagogical paradigm shift. I, a self-confessed cautious classicist, am not quite so eager to overhaul the status quo and not just because I fear that Zhao may throw my precious baby out with the metaphorical bathwater. While I agree that educational institutions should focus on amplifying students’ strengths rather than fixating on their weaknesses, this idea is predicated on students and teachers knowing what those strengths and weaknesses are.

I am confident in my belief that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of brilliant classicists in Victoria who will never have the opportunity to learn Latin in secondary school. This untapped potential is not the result of a “deficit-driven education paradigm” but lack of access to educational resources that have the possibility of enriching a student’s academic life in the same way Latin has enriched my own. However, as eager as I am to thrust a ‘Baby’s First Latin Reader’ into the hands of every middle-schooler within reach, I acknowledge that there are limits on a school’s staff, budget and resources. Instituting a Latin department in every secondary school, no matter how utopian, is an unrealistic solution to a very real issue.

In this essay I have failed to mention a way in which a very determined Latinist could enrol in Latin at a VCE level even if their school does not have an official Latin program, through the Victorian School of Languages (VSL). The VSL offers Latin to students only through distance education and has for many years been seen as a viable option only for students who have the knowledge and resources to complete the course by themselves. When I was completing Latin at high school, the VSL was notorious for offering their Latin students little to no support and was associated with various horror stories.

However, the past year and a half has forced us to re-examine the efficacy of long-distance education and been the catalyst for many educational innovations as teachers were forced to adapt to teaching online. It is my belief, therefore, that if the VSL Latin program was redesigned with the goal of reaching the maximum number of students and encouraged as an accessible option to those seeking to learn a second language in VCE, it could help to minimise the inequity associated with Latin as a discipline.

Ideally, the VSL Latin program, when given the requisite amount of funding and advertising, could bring enough students into the subject that its scaling would no longer be artificially inflated by manufactured scarcity. Even if this were not the case, it would allow all students enrolled in VCE equal opportunity to take a subject that would foster their academic abilities and statistically improve their chances of receiving a high ATAR.

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