The first thing to say is that the cartoons are now colourised. The pedagogical philosophy behind the course remains unchanged. My ongoing concerns aside, my focus for this blog post is on the specific changes made between the new 5th edition and its predecessor. Many of the changes I chose to make were as a result of the fact that I am not convinced by the philosophy behind the CLC and other courses which are usually named “reading courses” – if you’d like to know more about this, then my discussion with Caroline is definitely worth you listening to, as is my final interview of the same season with David Carter, who is an advocate for comprehensible input. I have worked with this course for 21 years and I probably know Book 1 better than most people – not least because I spent the last few years of my career re-writing it in order to resolve some of the concerns I had with its approach. As a perhaps reluctant CLC expert, I can assure you that they are not. To the untrained eye, the changes to Book 1 might seem somewhat superficial.
So what exactly has changed for Caecilius? There has been a surprising lack of response from the Classics world about the 5th edition, although its attempts to rethink itself have been seized upon with tedious predictability by certain quarters of the mainstream media, who found themselves in a panic that Caecilius and his friends were going woke. I immediately ordered myself a copy of what’s already available, which is the first two volumes, and have decided to review the changes to Book 1 in this blog post next week I shall examine Book 2 as there is far too much to say about both volumes to cover it all in one post. I recently interviewed Caroline for my podcast, and found her insights into how the course has been restructured and reinvented for the modern world truly fascinating. The course is currently in the midst of a radical overhaul, overseen by Caroline Bristow and her team of writers at CSCP, whom she describes as passionate curators of the characters and their stories. I personally used it throughout my 21-year career, despite having much to say about about its approach and scope the first book is truly inspired and therefore inspiring, and even those of us who take issue with its theoretical approach to the language find it hard to resist its allure. Whilst complained about and much-discussed by tradtionalists and modernists alike, Book 1 in particular is used in the overwhelming majority of schools that teach Latin. Written originally in the 1970s as a radical push-back against traditional methods of Latin teaching, the CLC has become the orthodoxy for recent generations. The Cambridge Latin Course has endured for so long that it has become a lens through which our subject is viewed by the outside world.
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