Latin By The Natural Method: First Year

✍ Scribed by Most, William G., Ph.D.

• Publisher: Henry Regnery Co.
• Year: 1964
• Tongue: English, Latin
• Leaves: 191
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Third Revised Edition
The foreword cites a fascinating Appendix from Saint Ignatius' Idea of a Jesuit University on the history of Latin instruction. In St. Thomas's time up to St. Ignatius's, children 6-14 years old were given direct instruction in Latin for every subject, and their textbooks were all in Latin! Amazing! What a blessing!
The humanists and their "pure" Ciceronian Latin fanaticism actually contributed to the fossilization of Latin, turning it into a dead language! Latin was in high demand for legal, merchant, political, etc. careers. These humanists made some improvements to Latin instruction initially, but then it turned into a mere mental gymnastics exercise.

John Locke proposed the theory that schools were primarily for mental discipline, rather than for conveying a content of knowledge to the pupils. The vague implication was that somehow the pupil would acquire the knowledge after graduation: his schooling would be merely an exercise, a mental discipline.
foreword:
(Ability to read Latin at sight was ranked only in last place among the nineteen ob­jectives of Latin teaching listed by the teachers during the Classical Investigation of 1923.) With most students the learning of Latin became drudgery rather than fun and a growing sense of achievement. Enrollments fell. In 1910, 49.05% of the American high school students were taking Latin. By 1954, only 7% were studying it (-1.3% in Alabama, 5.8% in Wisconsin, 16.4% in Connecticut).
And in St. Thomas's to St. Ignatius' time, Latin had already ceased being a vernacular language for ~⅔ of a millennium! Latin was just as non-vernacular to them as to us.
cf. the preface to Coulombe's French transl. for a brief history of Latin teaching in France. As late as the 18th century, French schoolchildren even had to speak Latin during recess, and they were punished if they used French!
cf. CercleLatin's posts on why "la méthode Most-Coulombe est l’une des meilleures".
Fr. Most biography
LearnChurchLatin.com posts on LbtNM; partial audio tapes (Mediatrix Press promises edited versions at some point.)
Cf. this testimony of LbtNM (salient points transl. into French)
"19th century Latin textbooks?" Latin StackExchange question:
The late 19th century primarily used grammar books for teaching Latin.
Latin was used for all subjects (including recess time!) as late as the end of the 18th century in France. Physics was first taught in French in 1783; cf. Lucien Gagne, C.Ss.R.'s preface to Victor Coulombe's transl. of Fr. William Most's Latin by the Natural Method.
In the 13th-16th centuries, all oral lectures and textbooks for all subjects for children 6-14 were entirely in Latin, despite it not having been a vernacular for almost a millennium.
See:
Ganss, George E., S.J., "Appendix 1: A Sketch of the History of Latin Teaching." In Saint Ignatius' Idea of a Jesuit University a Study in the History of Catholic Education, Including Part Four of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, 218-58. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1954.
cf. the foreword of Latin by the Natural Method (vol. 1) for a summary.
"How to Read & Speak Latin Fluently" mentions the need of having read/listened to at least a few million words before being able to have a command on the language.