"The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which is inhabited by the Belgians, another by the Aquitani, and the third by those who, in their language of the Celts, are called our Gauls." Wissen bald nur noch wenge, dass so Cäsars "De bello Gallico" beginnt? Das Schüler-Interesse an Latin ist zurückgegangen.
Munich (dpa / lby) - After English, Latin is still the second most frequently chosen foreign language in high schools. But the number of students is declining, as the Ministry of Education announced on request: For the 2021/22 school year there was a decrease of 5.5 percent compared to the 2017/18 school year. According to this, 114,100 schoolchildren dealt with Latin vocabulary or translated Caesar, Seneca or Cicero last year.
The ministry attributes this development primarily to the fact that there were fewer information events at high schools due to the corona restrictions - and these are very important for Latin in particular in order to illustrate the subject matter.
Harald Kloiber, Bavarian regional head of the German Association of Classical Philologists, sees it that way too. The information events are immensely important, he said. With French, for example, it is clear that it is a modern, communication-oriented foreign language. Different Latin. The focus is also on culture, on history, on literature. "At these events, reservations can be broken down very well."
Learning a modern foreign language at a grammar school is tempting because you can use what you have learned on holiday, for example. However, that contradicts what constitutes high school education, said Kloiber: Latin lessons teach knowledge about antiquity, including literary genres, politics and philosophy, it is about "existential questions and basic values". The effects on the German lessons are positive. In Latin, you work with literary texts from an early age. For example, it will be shown: How does rhetoric work, how does manipulation via language work? "There's a lot of potential if you let yourself in for it."
According to figures from the Ministry of Education, English was on the timetable for 307,000 high school students in the past school year. Other modern foreign languages have seen slight increases over the past five years, with the total number of students remaining almost the same. French increased by 3.3 percent and Spanish by 2.8 percent.
