Jan Preiss

The first time I started learning Latin, my enthusiasm faded away quickly. The whole experience was that of a very dry intellectual exercise - contrary to my expectation, there were no conversation classes and I was stuck translating dull sentences about industrious Roman farmers and their chaste wives. However, I did not get put off for long and after some research, I restarted my studies at the Accademia Vivarium Novum in Rome, a unique humanist school where Latin is spoken at all times, spending two months fully immersed in the language and learning through the so-called direct method (i.e. the method normally used when learning modern languages). Shortly thereafter, I came to Winchester College, the oldest and one of the most prestigious British public schools, as an exchange student from Johannes Kepler Grammar School in Prague. I soon found out that after two months of Latin on the direct method, I was more than able to match my classmates, some of whom had been learning the language for over six years using the traditional translation-based method. Subsequently, the school offered me to stay as a scholar which I did, taking up philosophy and beginning to learn Ancient Greek in which, too, I quickly caught up with my classmates. By the end of my sixth form studies, I had become the president of the Winchester College Classical Society, won the prestigious Goddard Scholarship (a Winchester College classics award) as well as the Queen’s Gold Medal for Latin Prose, and passed exams in Latin, Greek, Philosophy & Theology, and Further Mathematics, all with distinction. In my free time, I have been pursuing many of my passions and interests, mainly tennis, running, modern languages, liberal political theory, coding, guitar, and opera. With the support of Bakala Foundation, I am now going to continue my studies at New College, Oxford, where I am hoping to get a deeper understanding of ancient literature and philosophy. Concurrently, I am hoping to use my experience of the direct method to contribute to the reform of Latin and Greek pedagogy so that the field may once again enter mainstream education, helping to create a strong transnational identity in the West based on our common Graeco-Roman heritage.