Latin returns to middle schools and, having said that, it seems that from this year all Italian students will have to start declining again rose, rosae between school desks; but things are different.
With the new national guidelines for the curriculum, starting from the 2026/2027 school year, lower secondary schools can introduce Latin for language education, abbreviated LEL, in second and third grades. However, it will not be a new compulsory subject for everyone: in this first phase it is included as an “optional and curricular” discipline. Furthermore, from 2027/2028, the new framework provides for those who choose it an additional hour per week, equal to 33 hours per year, without subtracting hours from teaching Italian. The students of the interested classes can therefore choose whether or not to include it in their course.
The reintroduction of Latin has reopened a question that we have never stopped asking ourselves: in 2026, what is the point of studying a language that we no longer speak?
What really changes: what Latin will be like in middle school
Let’s go step by step. The new teaching is called Latin for linguistic education and this alone helps us understand what the training objectives should be. First of all, the LEL is intended for students in the second and third classes of lower secondary school and is optional. In the 2026/2027 school year, individual schools can already activate it by inserting it into the three-year plan of the training offer and using the spaces for autonomy, flexibility and expansion of the training offer.
The Ministry suggests at least one hour per week. From 2027/2028, however, the decree-law 170 of 30 September 2026 has defined the organization more precisely: an additional weekly hour will be foreseen, equal to 33 hours per year, therefore without subtracting hours from the teaching of Italian.
The evaluation will also be independent of that of Italian: the LEL teacher will participate in the evaluation of the students who have chosen teaching according to the rules established for lower secondary school. The legislation also provides that, in the configuration made structural from 2027/28, Latin will be entrusted to teachers of the A-12 competition class who have passed at least one annual exam or two semester exams in Latin language or literature, or acquired at least 12 CFU in the L-FIL-LET/04 sector.
Why the reintroduction
The latest national guidelines for the curriculum of nursery school and the first cycle of education date back to 2012, 14 years ago. The new Indications, issued on 9 December 2025, took into account above all the changed social and cultural framework and the effects of the accelerated use of digital technologies on learning methods and on the relationships of pupils and students, as declared by the official document.
This framework also includes what we could define as regaining contact with one’s roots, that is, the desire to promote rapprochement with the linguistic and cultural roots of European civilization; enhance the historical narrative, the awareness of the European heritage and the relationship that inextricably links the present to the past, encouraging interconnection with civic education.
The directions read:
With the aim of connecting the world that is expressed in Latin with the experience of the students and with contemporary reality, establishing a virtuous dynamic of acquisition of the past, understanding of the present and comparison with its demands, preparation for the future.
It will be up to each educational institution, based on the specific context of reference, to define plans, times, organizational methods and resources for the activation of this teaching, which is suggested to be at least one hour per week.
What will be studied?
And here we are at the central question. Among the reasons indicated in the new Indications we find the idea that Latin can help students to better understand Italian grammar and vocabulary and that it accustoms them to “logic and reasoning”. It is probably also the reason why we have all, at least once, heard Latin defined as a sort of “gym for the mind”.
The ministerial document actually uses this argument. But here we must distinguish two things: the educational objectives that we can attribute to the study of a discipline and the effects that we can demonstrate scientifically. The idea that translating a Latin sentence requires reasoning has its own logic: it is necessary to recognize the forms of the words, understand what function they perform in the sentence, relate elements that may be very distant from each other and finally reconstruct a coherent meaning. The problem arises when we move from this to claiming that studying Latin automatically makes you more intelligent, better at mathematics or more capable of reasoning in general.
But the new Indications pose the question in a decidedly more interesting way: the introduction of the LEL has the declared objective of reflection on language. In linguistics we talk about metalinguistic awarenessthat is, the ability to not limit oneself to using a language, but to consciously observe its functioning. For example: why does a word change shape? How do we recognize the subject of a sentence? Why do apparently very different words have a common root? How does the meaning of a word change over the centuries? Latin offers a lot of material for doing this type of work, especially in the case of Italian, which is a Romance language and derives historically from spoken Latin.
In order to achieve this objective, the new Indications place great emphasis on comparison between Latin, Italian and other languages studied and on the historical and semantic dimension of the lexicon. The value of Latin, therefore, would be in offering a privileged observation point on history and functioning of Italian and an important part of European languages, as well as reflection on the structure and general functioning of languages.
But is studying Latin really useful today?
There’s another reason why in 2026 we continue to study a language that we don’t use to order a coffee or talk to someone on the street. Latin was not a “dead” language at all. After the end of the Western Roman Empire it continued to be used in European religion, philosophy, law, science, literature and universities. It means that a huge part of our cultural history has passed through this language.
Knowing even a few elements of Latin therefore allows us to recognize what we still encounter today in the inscriptions in churches and monuments, in the formulas of law, in scientific terminology, in university mottos or in many expressions that we continue to use, often without thinking. And this is the second function that the Indications attribute to the LEL: acquiring the tools to recognize the relationship between the ancient and contemporary world and understanding the role that the Latin tradition had in the formation of European culture.
So, is it necessary? It depends on what we mean when we say that something is “needed”. If we expect Latin to automatically make you smarter, improve mathematical skills or constitute a generic mental gymnastics, the available research do not allow us to say this with certainty. Indeed, the most recent results invite us to be cautious in distinguishing what Latin produces from what already characterizes the students who choose to study it.
If, however, we think of Latin as a tool for observing the language, better understanding the lexicon, acquiring awareness of how languages work, reconstructing the relationships between words and accessing a part of European cultural history, then its usefulness is more than tangible. The real novelty of LEL lies in the desire to use a language from the past as a tool for better understand what we speak in the present.
