We know very little, however, about how skilful Schubert's Latin and Greek teachers were, and whether they inspired affection or fear in their young charge. ![]() The classical languages were a byword for unproductive drudgery for centuries of students who longed to be parsed-over-spared the summons to construe their inadequately prepared passages of Livy and Virgil under the beady eye of a cane-wielding magister.įranz Schubert had the advantage (at least as far as his Latin studies were concerned) of living in a Roman Catholic country we know that he had a very pious upbringing, and that the sound of Latin, and its use in daily prayers, would have been part of his life from very early on. Although curricula gradually diversified over the next three hundred years, nineteenth-century schoolchildren still took it for granted that a good deal of their time would be spent poring over the runes of the ancients. In the time of Shakespeare, classics dominated education: when Jaques in As You Like It speaks of the whining schoolboy 'creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school' we can be certain that had textbooks been supplied to pupils in the Bard's time, the youngster would have been carrying a deadly Latin grammar in his satchel. ![]() It is only relatively recently that the teaching of Latin and Greek has ceased to be central to the school systems of European countries.
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