Latin life lessons from Quintus son of Caecilius

Lucy Kellaway’s article “Get with the program” (Life & Arts, September 8) — given pride of place on the class noticeboard — is a great hit with our Year 12 and 13 students at Guildford County School, as Latin shares a teaching-room with business studies and economics, and they are also studying maths and computing. Lively debate has ensued.

Our Year 8 students, too, are delighted that, like them, Ms Kellaway can say: “Caecilius est in horto”, By the time you progress from the family-based “orange booklets” to green, however, Quintus (son of Caecilius) is embroiled in political intrigue: a foreign power’s machinations involve a failed assassination attempt in Britain. Coming into contact with the poison, an innocent freedman dies instead.

As Ms Kellaway says, “If the point
of school is to prepare kids for the world . . . ”

Susan Neil-Smith

Guildford, Surrey, UK

Letter in response to this letter:

Latin lessons in entrepreneurship / From Pat Story, Cambridge, UK