The Blind Guides of the Classical Education Movement

If you looked closely enough, you could probably see rare tears running down the red faces and golden stubble of the camouflage-clad fathers in the audience of our school’s winter concert. The calloused and worn hands of working-class men clapped peals of thunder. When was the last time that these rural Midwesterners had heard school children offer rousing renditions of “Oh Shenandoah” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Perhaps the grandmas in the risers experienced a jolt of memory taking them back to the days before 5th graders “rapped” on the theme of “reduce, recycle, reuse.”  

As exhausted as I was as a first-year teacher in the school’s inaugural year, I knew what I was seeing and hearing: the instantiation of Hillsdale College’s vision. It’s hard to recall those pioneer days with anything other than awe and wonder and deep admiration for my colleagues. Just a few months previous, we were gathered in a space at a strip-mall, praying for the timely completion of renovations to our recently acquired building, watching enrollment stats dwindle due to a two-week delay to the start of our school year, and enduring weekly hit pieces by local press which favored the teachers’ unions. But in that moment, hearing that applause, our success was palpable; the denizens of southern Indiana would be knocking down our doors to enroll their children for the next school year. Rather than savoring the victory, however, I couldn’t help feeling increasingly alienated from the conception of “classical” education propagated by Hillsdale’s Barney Charter Initiative.

Returning to an Unknown Past

Hillsdale’s objective of cultivating a virtuous and informed citizenry for the recovery of our republic is subject to the same foibles as any stripe of restorationism, pedagogical, ecclesial, or otherwise. There is always a temptation toward a myopic nostalgia that blurs the plurality and depth of the past, presenting a pristine singularity, a chimeric monolith, a better, purer, more wholesome paragon. For the Hillsdale “classical” charter schools, the archetype was pure fiction, literally. During our in-service training, we were invited into the pages of Little House on the Prairie to a school showcase of children reciting poems and astonishing their parents with complex mental math. 

However judicious you may find the goal of preserving America’s experiment with Enlightenment liberalism—and I have my misgivings—there is nothing particularly classical about Tom Sawyer, “Frog Went A-Courtin’,” and a curriculum heavy on the American Civil War. To be sure, Latin was a part of the curriculum, one subject among many. But I doubt that the tedium of drilling Wheelock’s year after year, perhaps a metaphor for the repetitive rigors of American pioneer life, produced budding classicists among any but the most devoted masochists. Any suggestion of an alternate curriculum was met with guffaws. 

While not every corner of the classical school movement breathes the same spirit of American exceptionalism, a superficial redolence of antiquity is endemic. Despite the fact that most of the prominent advocates of “classical” education display little more than a passing familiarity with the history of pedagogy before the late 19th century, not a few representatives of this surprisingly diverse movement have no qualms with making confident pronouncements about what “classical” education is or is not. These pronouncements nearly always assume the form of a restorationist narrative according to which decline set in during the 20th century and what is on offer is a return to that good old-timey education. Rarely, however, do the thought-leaders of this movement use documentary evidence to substantiate their claims about a supposed golden age of learning beyond the horrors of Dewey and the natural method. Blind faith in crassly ignorant claims about the past have often ossified into unwavering adherence to torturous and repellent teaching based on a number of false equivalences: change is new is progressive is bad.

It’s charitable to suspect that the lack of a vigorous historiography of pedagogy among the “classical” crowd is due more to the profound scope of such an undertaking and the lack of skills to investigate the matter rather than an absence of interest. However, even a cursory glance at curricula from three centuries ago would confront the “classical” crowd with a bitter reality: not only did classical schools of the past read authors from antiquity almost exclusively, they did so in Latin and (sometimes) Greek. An honest appraisal of the past would shatter the fragile pretentions of the self-appointed repristinationists.  

Reform, From the Beginning

There never has been a singular, unanimously received pedagogical model. Already in the some of the most foundational works of Western literature, Plato’s dialogues (especially the Gorgias and Phaedrus), we encounter the eventual Enemy of the State, Socrates, taking aim at the most celebrated—and handsomely paid—pedagogue of his time, the eponymous Gorgias. And by doing so, Socrates takes aim at the entire Sicilian school of rhetoric then in vogue with the aristocratic youth. The art of rhetoric as pushed by Tisias, Gorgias, et al. turned on the use of rhetorical figures and creation of an appearance of probability to make the weaker argument into the stronger, a form of verbal ju-jitsu. (Imagine a murder case wherein the highly suspect next-of-kin were to argue: “Everyone knows that my wife and I were at each other’s throats. Why would I murder her when I knew everyone would immediately suspect me of the murder?”) More important than the truth itself is what a crowd is willing to accept as plausible. When Socrates rehearses for his interlocutor Phaedrus the teachings of Tisias, he has the entire post-elementary education of his age by the jugular. Socrates addresses Tisias in absentia, using a communicatio, itself a rhetorical trope ironically enough: “Tisias, some time ago, before you came along, we were saying that this probability of yours was accepted by the people because of its likeness to truth; and we just stated that he who knows the truth is always best able to discover likenesses. And so, if you have anything else to say about the art of speech, we will listen to you; but if not, we will put our trust in what we said just now.”¹ By ignoring the truth, Tisias’ teachings can’t live up to their claims.

Those who know the truth, who know man’s soul, have no need of learning to manipulate probability. In one fell swoop, Socrates has undermined the entire curriculum, reducing the great many things in the books written about the art of rhetoric, “ἐν τοῖς βιβλίοις τοῖς περὶ λόγων τέχνης γεγραμμένοις”² to niceties of the art, “τὰ κομψὰ τῆς τέχνης.” In a deft sermocinatio, Socrates has Pericles patting himself and Phaedrus on the head, gently admonishing them not to mistake the “necessary lessons” of those who are ignorant of dialectic with the true essence of rhetoric. In his concession that these lessons are necessary, Socrates is dripping with irony. These necessary lessons, Phaedrus must admit, are small things that have been made big things. Phaedrus himself has been deceived by appearances. Indeed, these lessons are nothing that nature and practice cannot teach. When he has brought Phaedrus far enough, Socrates can drop the facade and the irony:

“Those whom you have heard, who write treatises on the art of speech nowadays, are deceivers and conceal the nature of the soul, though they know it very well. Until they write and speak by this method we cannot believe that they write by the rules of art.”³ In the character of Socrates, the Western canon introduces us to a perennial figure in the history of the West: the pedagogical reformer.

When Classical Education Actually Existed

Nevertheless, despite generationally renewed efforts at reform and extensive parochial and confessional diversity, the epithet “klassich gebildet” (classically educated) had a recognizable cachet from the beginnings of the Early Modern Era well into the 19th century on the European continent. While the curricular details varied from territory to territory, a classically educated student could, in theory at least, fluently read, compose, and often speak Latin with a latinity that more or less emulated authors from antiquity. Some competence in Greek, reading and perhaps composition, was generally assumed, although mileage often varied, the obsession with Hellenism peaking during the age of the Neohumanists.  That in the 17th century a student who studied at a gymnasium in Hamburg could obtain a magister artium at Tübingen and a doctor theologiae at Jena is sufficient to demonstrate a commonality of curricular goals notwithstanding the variety of curricula. (In fact, touring a number of universities was the rule rather than the exception, so much so that a genre of academic guidebooks proliferated.)⁴ In every case, competence in the language(s) was the floor and not the ceiling, and certainly not optional window dressing.

Though the pedigree of this system has deep roots in the Latin and trivial schools of the Late Middle Ages as well as the pedagogical impulses of 15th century Renaissance Humanism, it was the confluence of Late-humanism and the Wittenberg Reformation that provided the broad outlines of an educational structure and a network of institutions which persisted on the European continent from the 16th century on. Much as men like Vittorino da Feltre were committed to promoting a curricular program centered in the sources of antiquity, the efforts of early Humanist pedagogical reformers were sporadic and discrete. Those who were present at the Castle Church in Wittenberg on August 29, 1518, for the inaugural address of the scrawny, 21-year-old Wunderkind Philipp Schwarzerd, hellenized as Melanchthon, witnessed the dawning of a new era. The subject: pedagogical reform, in Latin “De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis”⁵ (On correcting the studies of the youth). 

In elegant, byzantine periods, Melanchthon offers his own narrative of the decline of good letters and his confident hopes for renewal. His speech teems with the self-assured erudition of a peerless prodigy. The rub: Ad fontes! Perfect your Latin. Read the best Latin authors. Learn Greek and read the best Greek authors, because you haven’t actually understood the Latin authors until you’ve read the Greek authors: “Sapere audete, veteres Latinos colite, Graeca amplexamini, sine quibus Latinia tractari recte nequeeunt.” Read only the best works: “Ex optimis optima selige.”  Some are essential: “Homerus Graecis fons omnium disciplinarum, Vergilius ac Horatius Latinis.” If anyone has ever given a true definition of “classical education,” this is it.

Martin Luther, in the audience that day, was won over immediately. As Luther was increasingly drawn into the center of continental politics and as his appeals resonated among the German nobility, the young humanist Melanchthon was called upon to give direction to the educational endeavors of the evangelical territories. Melanchthon, his colleagues, and their successors provided the curricular outline for school orders across the Holy Roman Empire. While Melanchthon’s marriage of humanism, Biblical philology, and Aristotelianism was not the only show in town, it was the main event and would be for centuries.  

As the 17th century jurist and historian Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff acknowledged, Melanchthon and his disciples had remade the educational landscape of the Holy Roman Empire, not only reforming the curriculum but vastly expanding the number of schools and improving standards.⁶

Trouble in Classical Paradise

Nonetheless, even at the century’s end a number of witnesses attest that the graduates of these schools often left much to be desired. As August Tholuck noted in his account of academic life in the 17th century, “Not even in Latin, where a perfect routine should be expected given that the youth were always surrounded by a Latin atmosphere, were matters always well ordered.”⁷ In Basel the professors complained in 1597: “not only a certain lack of Latin speech, but even ignorance in speaking and writing has been detected in the beginners promoted to public lectures.”⁸ In 1630, the Consistory in Eisenach wrote, “[W]e have unhappily perceived among the prospective scholars a deficiency with regard to the fundamentals of the Latin language, so that they are not competent therein.”⁹

Given that most Schulordnungen devoted the lion’s share of instructional time to Latin, Michael Neander’s comment that “boys went to school for 10 years and only learned Latin and Greek in a very mediocre manner”¹⁰ indicates that the deficiency lie more with method than rigor. The experience attested by the Swedish diplomat Oxenstierna was not unique: “I recognized from an early age that the method of study then in use was something violent, but I could not grasp the matter.”¹¹ Janus Caecilius Frey, a professor at the Collegium Montaigu of the University of Paris from the beginning of the 17th century bemoaned: “Who is unaware that we are hardly able to acquire a mediocre knowledge of the languages, Latin and Greek especially, within the space of seven years or more?… What good is it? What fruit does it produce?”¹² Frey would have us believe that after six or seven years of such torture the students still stutter or babble a Frenchified Latin, or rather just French. Johann Michael Dilherr, one of the central figures in Nuremburg during the Baroque Era, noted by many of his contemporaries for his prowess in a number of languages, concedes in his Oratio de recta liberorum educatione: “But how many years does Latin demand for itself, a half a decade or so?… But who among us really masters the Latin language, that common Mercury of all peoples, before bordering on old age?”¹³ Acknowledging the difficulty of pinpointing the cause of such a universally experienced deficit given the diversity of curricula in the preparatory schools, a number of theologians at Jena nevertheless attributed the great difficulties with language acquisition to deficient methods in common use.¹⁴

In light of these deficiencies, it comes as no surprise that various pedagogical reformers found a generally receptive and enthusiastic audience among a wide swath of 17th century schoolmen, theologians, and the republic of letters. Although these reforms often embraced wide-ranging aspects of school life, especially morals and discipline, we will limit our discussion to the core of the curriculum, language instruction, which is particularly instructive for our own situation. 

The Inductive Model of Comenius

In his novissima linguarum methodus, Jan Amos Comenius, the most influential reformer of his generation, gives a brief survey of more recent attempts to improve the lamentable state of language instruction. After providing a rather extensive bibliography, Comenius remarks, “Why should I relate the other teachers who have sought ways of producing an easier method for the study of languages and have also published their plans? For within the last half century many have given themselves entirely to this task.”¹⁵ Most of the reformers Comenius discusses placed blame squarely at the feet of the received method of drilling grammatical precepts ad nauseum. While Comenius is critical of the radical proposals of Janus Caecilius Frey and Eilhard Lubinus to dispense with explicit grammar instruction entirely and replace it with language immersion—Lubinus imagines a monastic school where everyone from the teachers to the cooks speak pure “Roman” Latin—Comenius shares their basic premise: acquiring a language occurs inductively through use. “Practice itself—constant, easy, enjoyable—is the most certain means of the quickest progress.”¹⁶ He cites Cicero: “Frequent use supersedes the precepts of all teachers.”¹⁷

Much to Comenius’ chagrin, his theoretical didactic works were not as universally well received as the curricular tools he produced,¹⁸ especially his Janua linguaram reserata and Orbis sensualium pictus. Comenius never conceived of his lexical works as a self-contained curriculum but intended them to be used within the context of his all-encompassing method. In most cases, however, his works were accommodated to the prevailing Humanist system and included along extensive grammars.¹⁹ While some critics squabbled over Comenius’ deficient latinity and others faulted him for the chiliasm²⁰ inherent in his pansophistic utopianism, inertia rather than a universal, principled rejection of Comenius’ methodology seems to account for the enduring neglect of his ideas. Nevertheless, both of his most famous works which embodied his principles through the contextual use of vocabulary were frequently represented in curricula of various 17th century school orders²¹ and enjoyed enough reprintings, editions, and translations to fill up 400 pages of bibliography.

Ubiquitous complaints among 16th and 17th century pedagogues about the ineffectiveness of prevailing methods for language instruction, wide-spread receptiveness to new approaches, and the broad and enduring appeal of Comenius’ lexigraphical primers belie the assertion that hidden under the debris of modernity lies a singular, unsurpassed, “tried-and-true”²² method for teaching languages. While it is, admittedly, anachronistic to see in men like Comenius Early Modern analogues to such 20th century mavens as Stephen Krashen and Hans Ørberg, the similarities between their ideas are difficult to overlook. Apart from their many discrepancies, one common thread binds these theorists: their commitment to the primacy of inductive learning. Indeed, Comenius’ insight that language is learned in parallel with the res ipsa sounds remarkably like Krashen’s demonstrable claim that languages are learned through the communication of messages.  Had Comenius published a work as well-devised as Ørberg’s Lingua Latina Per Sē Illustrata, he might have outpublished even the Bible!

Blind Guides and Dim Bulbs

By contrast, the leading lights of today’s “classical” school movement burn particularly dim when it comes to language instruction.  Only someone who has never achieved fluency in another language would confuse the laborious process of deductively decoding a language with grasping what is communicated in that language. Make no mistake. This is what we are dealing with: “thought-leaders” who, by and large, cannot sight-read Latin, let alone speak it—to say nothing of Greek. The blind are leading the blind.

When Cheryl Lowe asserts that “the goal [of language instruction] was never to speak a language,”²³ it is painfully obvious to anyone with any knowledge of the matter that she has no idea what she is talking about. Already in the Late Middle Ages, conversation in Latin, even during play, was often compulsory at Latin schools.²⁴ Not only was this practice maintained in many of the schools that were created and reformed in the wake of Humanism, but the wide-spread prevalence of Erasmus’ Colloquia familiaria and similar texts attests to the attempt to establish a more classical norm for spoken Latin in terms of diction and syntax.²⁵ If the lower classes admitted some limited use of the vernacular, the upper classes of these schools often required extensive, if not exclusive, instruction and engagement in spoken Latin. By way of example, Johann Sebastian Bach was nearly passed over for the position of Kantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig because the city council found his spoken Latin unsatisfactory.²⁶ It was always the expectation of this system of education that students would communicate freely in Latin. The frequent inability of the regnant pedagogy to accomplish this end was deemed a failure—not a feature, as in today’s “classical schools.”

Before the classics became the province of specialists increasingly unequal even to the task of digging through the bones of the generations of philologists who preceded them, Humanists, who saw the languages as portals to the humanizing treasury of antiquity, viewed a lively, spoken, persuasive communication in the languages not only as a means to their end, but as the embodiment of the received tradition. The 17th century heirs of this admirable and ambitious program, dissatisfied with results, were willing to countenance improvements in methodology for the sake of achieving this end. 

Both the original purposes of this project as well as subsequent attempts to improve it seem entirely lost on most would-be classical revivalists. Like an unfortunate paleontologist mistakenly rearranging bones to register a species that never existed, they have placed Donatus, or rather the National Latin Exam cliff-notes, where Horace and Virgil belong.  They have confused the formal study of grammar for the thing itself, adopting a disordered teleology. Worse yet, they stopped digging when they thought they had found what they were looking for. Their dim sketches will not hold a candle to the actual forms that could fill a museum. Our task, aided by an actual rather than a feigned knowledge of the past, consists in furnishing an exhibit of that living latinity which not only proves the counterfeit, but draws men’s eyes and ears to the real thing.

Shawn Barnett has taught Latin, history, and theology at Immanuel Lutheran School, Alexandria, Virginia, since 2017. Previously, he taught 5th grade at Seven Oaks Classical School in Ellettsville, Indiana.  Mr. Barnett has a Master of Arts from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, having also studied for two semesters at the Lutherische Theologische Hochschule in Oberursel, Germany. Beginning in the fall of 2021, he will pursue doctoral studies at the University of Hamburg where he has been granted a fellowship in the program Interkonfessionalität in der Frühen Neuzeit. Mr. Barnett is married and has two young children.

This is the first essay in our symposium, “The Future of Classical Education.” See the introduction and a list of all the essays here.

1. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by H.N. Fowler. Loeb Classical Library. (London: William Heinemann, 2019), 559.
2. Idem, 536.
3. Idem, 551.
4. August Tholuck, Das akademische Leben des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts mit besonderer Beziehung auf die protestantisch-theologischen Fakultäten Deutschlands, nach handschriftlichen Quellen, Erste Abteilung: Die akademische Zustände. (Halle, Eduard Anton: 1853), 306.
5. Philippi Melancthonis opera quae supersunt omnia, vol. XI, edited by Carl Gottlieb Bretschnieder. Corpus Reformatorum. (Halle: C.A. Schwetschke, 1848) 15-25.
6. Teutscher Fürsten-Stat, 304.  Cited by Gerhard Menck in “Das Bildungswesen in den deutschen protestantischen Territorien der frühen Neuzeit” in Erziehung und Schulwesen zwischen Konfessionalisierung und Säkularisierung, ed. By Heinz Schilling, Stefan Ehrenpreis et al. (Münster, Waxmann Verlag: 2003) 52. “Dahero denn auch in den Landen Der Augspurgischen Confeßion die Christliche hohe Obrigkeit vorlängsten und sonderlich nach der Zeit der Reformation dahin gearbeitet und sich auch noch stets löblich bemühen, daß es nicht leichtlich an einem Ort des Landes, wo Leute beisammen wohnen und Kinder gezogen werden, an einer solchen Schul mangeln oder ja diselbe nicht ferne darvon, sondern bequemlich gelegen und zu finden sey.”
7. August Tholuck, Das akademische Leben des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts mit besonderer Beziehung auf die protestantisch-theologischen Fakultäten Deutschlands, nach handschriftlichen Quellen, Erste Abteilung: Die akademische Zustände. (Halle, Eduard Anton: 1853), 194. “Nicht einmal im Lateinischen, worin man doch bei der die Jugend allenthalben und immerwährend umgebenden lateinischen Atmosphäre eine vollkommene Routine erwarten sollte, ist es immer wohl bestellt.”
8. Ibid. “in tironibus ad publicas praelectiones promotis…deprehenditur non solommodo quaedam latini sermonis inopia sed etiam tum in loquendo tum in scribendo inscitia”
9. Ibid. “Sonsten haben wir ungern vernommen, dass bei den angehenden Stipendiaten an den fundamentis latinae linguae Mangel vorfällt, indem sie deren nicht allerdings mächtig”.
10. Idem, 195. “Mich. Neander führt die Beschwerde, daß Knaben 10 Jahr in die Schule gingen und Lateinisch und Griechisch nur sehr mittelmäßig lernten.”
11. Ibid. “Animadverti ego ab ineunte aetate, violentum quiddam esse usitatam studiorum methodum, sed ubi res haereat, deprehendere non poteram.”
12. Janus Caecilius Frey, VIA AD DIVAS SCIENTIAS, ARTESQUE, LINGVARUM NOTITIAM, SERMONES EXTEMPORANEOS, NOVA. & EXPEDITISSMA (Jena: 1674). “Linguarum, Graecae praesertim, & Latinae notitiam mediocrem septem pluriumque spatio annorum vix nos assequi posse, quis ignorat?  Miserima pueritia per tot gradatim classes Grammaticae annon miserabilem aetatem agit, teritque?…Cui bono? Quo fructu?”
13. Johann Michael Dilherr, Oratio de recta liberorum educatione (Nuremberg, Wolfgang Endter: 1642). “Latina vero quot sibi annos, vel lustra potius, deposcit? Quae causa?…Linguam vero Latinam, communem illum omnium populorum Mercurium, quotus quisque nostrum, ante extremam senectutis lineam, recte addiscit?”
14. Prall, A. (ed.) Pädogogische Schriften des Wolfgang Ratichius und seiner Anhänger (Breslau, Ferdinand Hirt: 1903) 13-14. “Wenn man heutigen Tages Nachfrage hält, woran doch der Mangel sei, daß manchmal Knaben entweder gar nichts oder sehr wenig oder gar langsam in den Sprachen und freien Künsten etwas lernen, so bringt man gemeiniglich nichts anderes herfür, als daß man klagt entweder über den Unfleiß und Nachlässigkeit der Präzeptoren oder über die Faulheit oder natürliche Ungeschicklichkeit der Discipulorum oder Knaben…. Denn obschon manchmal die Praeceptores großen Fleiß angewendet, auch die Knaben von Natur geschickt genug, dabeneben es an ihrem Fleiß nicht mangel lassen, so geht es doch gar langsam zu, wie die tägliche Erfahrung fast allenthalben bezeugt, daß ein Knabe zehn, zwölf, auch manchmal mehr Jahre zubringt, ehe er mediocriter oder ziemlichermaßen die lateinische und griechische Sprache lernten, die anderen Sprachen…. Woran mangelt es denn? Wir halten’s dafür, doch ohne Präjudiz oder Vorgriff, daß man bisher sich nicht einer gewissen und richtigen Lehrkunst, wie man nämlich die Jugend recht lehren und informieren soll, verglichen hat oder vergleichen können…so wollen wir…etliche unleugbare Defekte oder Mängel anzeigen, welche in sehr vielen…Schulen bis anhero befunden worden.”
15. J.A. COMENII DIDACTICORUM OPERUM. Pars II. Ea comprehendens quae ab Anno 1642 ad 1650 scripta & edita fuere […] (Amsterdam: De Geer, 1657), 86. “Alios Didacticos, qvi Lingvarum Methodum facilitandi qvaesiverunt vias, consiliaque sua in publicum qvoque dederunt, quid memorem? Fuerunt enim hoc semiseculo complures, que se totos huc dederant.”
16. Idem, 14. “Praxis erit ipsa, perpetua, facilis, jucunda, celerrimi profectus medium certissimum.”
17. Ibid. “Usus frequens omnium Magistrorum praecepta superat.”
18. Ernst Liese, Des J. A. Comenius Methodus Linguarum Novissima. Inhalt und Würdigung. (Bonn: Carl Georgi, Universitäts-Buchdruckerei, 1904), 10.
19. Cf. Reinhold Vormbaum (ed.), Evangelische Schulorndnungen, Zweiter Band: Die evangelische Schulordnungen des siebzehten Jahrhunderts. (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1861). For example, the school order for Moers prescribes the use of Comenius’ Orbis sensualium pictus alongside Vossius’ Grammatica. Likewise, the Magdeburg school order of 1658 assigns the use of Schmid’s Grammatica after completing the Orbis pictus.
20. Ernst Liese. Des J. A. Comenius Methodus Linguarum Novissima. Inhalt und Würdigung. (Bonn: Carl Georgi, Universitäts-Buchdruckerei, 1904), 10.
21. Cf. Vormbaum, Evangelische Schulordnungen, Bd. II.
22. Cheryl Lowe, “The Wrong Way to Teach Latin,” The Classical Teacher, Spring 2020.
23. Ibid.
24. Cf. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Sein Weg zur Reformation. 1483-1521. (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1986), 24. Brecht describes how students at the trivial school in Mansfeld were punished for using the vernacular.  For a more extensive treatment of the use of spoken Latin in schools from the 14^th-17^th centuries, see Terence Tunberg, DE RATIONIBUS QUIBUS HOMINES ARTEM LATINE COLLOQUENDI ET EX TEMPORE DICENDI SAECULIS XVI ET XVII COLUERUNT (Lueven University Press, 2012).
25. Jürgen Leonhard, Latin: Story of a World Language, trans. Kenneth Kronenberg. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2013), 219-220.
26. Idem, 256.