However, soon this won t be an option for New Zealand s public school students.
The education minister, Chris Hipkins, has announced that Latin will no longer be an NCEA subject by 2023.
Hipkins cited poor student uptake as the main reason behind the change: only around 200 students from 10 schools around Aotearoa take NCEA Latin, and only about 25 at level 3.
However, even if it s a language whose spoken applications have long since died off, Latin is still all around us - from the legal system, to medicine, zoology, botany, religious studies.
Thousands of words we use in everyday conversation trace their roots back to Latin.
Today on
The Detail, Emile Donovan speaks to Mitchell, and to Mark Honeychurch from the Society for Science-based Healthcare, about the lax regulations and enforcement of natural medications in New Zealand. Our rules around medications and supplements is a matter of language. If you re selling a product which claims to have a therapeutic purpose - as in, something that will cure or correct an ailment - it falls under the Medicines Act of 1981, and must meet stringent requirements. In order to sell a pill which you say nullifies headaches, you have to prove it does, in fact, nullify headaches. However, if you re hawking a supplement which you claim is an innovative combination of ingredients which can boost the body s ability to stave off common ailments and reduce the likelihood of headaches, regulation is much thinner on the ground.
Fallen politician Jami-Lee Ross has turned his hand to selling "health" supplements with dubious benefits. It's an industry that's thinly regulated and barely policed.