Ep 14 | But Do I Really Need to Teach Latin and Greek?
I couldn’t start closing out this third season without answering the question in the back of everyone’s minds: Do I really need to teach my kids Latin and Greek?
Footnotes for this episode
Climbing Parnassus, Tracy Lee Simmons
“Why Latin? Pars Quattuor: Civilization” Timothy Wallis
Wheelock’s Latin
A Defense of Latin & Classical Education, Memoria Press
LEAVE A REVIEW
Would you like to help other new-to-homeschooling moms wrap their hands around the ideals and principles of a classical Charlotte Mason education? Leaving a podcast rating and review can do just that.
JOIN THE MOTHER-TEACHERS IN COMMON HOUSE
Join the 675+ mother-teachers in Common House (It’s like a Patreon, but better.) where we think deeply and learn together through full courses, bonus minisodes, monthly Q+A video calls, resources, and more!
READ THE TRANSCRIPT
She was about five feet tall, almost a full eight inches shorter than me, but no teacher had ever frightened me like Mrs. Zigelis. She was my Latin teacher for ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade. Every day, while we attempted to translate, she would pace the rows of desks with a yardstick. She would hit a desk and shout out a declension or conjugation, and the desk sitter would shout out the appropriate answers. I hated this.
But, walk past thirty-three-year-old me and hit my table while yelling, “Perfect tense!” and I will, without missing a beat, yell back, “ī, istī, it, imus, istus, ērunt”.
____
Now, you, dear classical Mason mother-teacher, know better than to instill fear into your children with Latin facts—even though fear can be quite the tactic in memory work. I kid you not; I can still recall certain Latin words and facts faster than I can tell you all the birthdays of my children. But did I love Latin? Mrs. Zigelis? I did not.
I signed up for Latin as a bright-eyed ninth grade because I was set on becoming a doctor. A pediatric neurologist to be exact. Even at fourteen, I knew Latin would help me with my SAT scores and understanding of medical terminology. I was the ideal modern utilitarian pragmatist in my formal years of education.
I wish I could say I fell in love with this beautiful—albeit dead—language but I cannot. I hated it and my only consolation was that it was better than Greek because at least I already knew the alphabet.
If you’ve looked through classical curricula or heard about your local classical second graders chanting Latin songs or Greek Bible verses, you may have wondered if Latin and Greek are really necessary in our modern age.
And I understand the question.
Latin, for one, isn’t spoken anymore. We have options among options for English translations of the greatest texts ever written. So, reading the original Latin is no longer a problem. If it’s supposed to help our kids be logical thinkers, aren’t there other ways to reach that same end? Those same SAT scores?
Greek is, at least, spoken today but even then, we can get those English translations for the older Greek texts and wouldn’t it be better for our children to concentrate on a language they may actually use in a real-life context—like Spanish or French?
It’s probably not great to throw this out right now, but I’m going to go for it: I do think you need to teach Latin and Greek in a classical education but I don’t think my argument is strong enough to convince everyone.
This is probably for several reasons but my suspicion is our modernity is getting in the way. Hear me out. We prize objective outcomes, utilitarian measures, convenience, and time.
While learning Latin and/or Greek does offer many objective, utilitarian outcomes, no one continues learning either of these languages for such an end as SAT scores.
Ask me how I know. Did you note I didn’t continue with Latin during my senior year of high school? I had learned dissections made me queasy and my SAT scores were just fine; no medical school in my future meant no more of the dead language.
There wasn’t love.
Why spend so much time learning a language that’s useless in our modern speech, global economy? What’s the point in making kids endure such torture if colleges no longer require it?
You’ve either heard or thought all of these.
But I do think even the classical Mason mom has been so formed by our current time and place that we struggle to submit to the arguments I’ll make in favour of learning Latin and Greek. But, I hope you’ll give me a listen. We’ve had a good time this season, yes?
And our season captain idea says, “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.”
Consider if knowledge and self-discipline, as they’re given in the classical languages, can really be given in any other way. Form is as important as content. Keep that in mind.
So, let’s begin.
Halfway through 2020, I was on holiday, awake at two o’clock in the morning, nursing my youngest who was six weeks old at the time. Through a series of links, I found myself reading an article about learning Latin. By the end of it, I was on Amazon ordering a Latin book for myself. It would be easy to dismiss this as an odd middle-of-the-night-nursing purchase (Because who hasn’t made one of those?) but something inspiring had sparked a thought in my mind. And as ideas do, it captured me. But maybe you haven’t had this moment.
I think for many, the idea of learning the classical languages feels like watching a sad child in black academic robes at school in a PBS masterpiece classic period drama. Said child is waiting for his holiday to begin so he can escape the Professor Snape-like tutor who, unsurprisingly, walks through the rows of desks with a yardstick. He probably has to yell the perfect tense endings.
But this is not how the languages were historically taught. Did they require hard work? Absolutely. But was it considered worth it? Absolutely.
You see, learning the classical languages, had a two-fold benefit for the students: it produced mental rigor through linguistic gymnastics and it was a training in taste. Learning Latin and Greek was not a secondary goal in education but a primary concern. Mastery was considered necessary for understanding one’s own language (like English), and for polishing and refining the mind and soul of a student.
Per the norm, knowing wasn’t enough–even in Latin and Greek studies. The classical languages were to change the student for the better.
Within classical education, there’s an understanding that Latin and Greek are the crown languages of the western world. Latin was the language of the law and the Roman state. It became the language of Europe and, through the Roman Catholic Church, the main language of the West. About 60% of our English language is derived from Latin.
Ancient Greek was the queen of the philosophical languages. The gospels and St. Paul’s epistles were written in Greek, as were the early Church councils and the Church fathers. The Christian faith cannot be separated or understood apart from the Greek language.
While it sounds odd or elite or impractical for a student in the year of our Lord 2023 to learn Latin and Greek, this is the path marked in the classical tradition by wiser minds.
Let me give you one of their inspiring ideas.
During the Renaissance, “climbing Parnassus” became a bit of a phrase to explain the glorious and difficult journey of learning Latin and Greek. It was on everyone’s coffee mugs, wall pendants, and iPhone backgrounds.
Mt. Parnassus towered above the Shrine of Delphi as a symbol of poetic inspiration and perfection in the Western world. Its height pulled people’s eyes up to heaven and the spring that trickled below was a reminder of life. Mt. Parnassus became a picture of what man ought to achieve and how difficult the work of becoming his divine self would be. To labour and patiently work for something beyond immediate gain or pragmatism was a picture of good work. It was probably unattainable for most—because they would not work or could not work for it—but favour would be gifted to those willing to work and wait. Doing the hard thing meant earning the reward.
To labour with something like the classical languages was supposed to transform the intellectual and aesthetic nature of the student. It was whole-orbed, whole-person; and it was, as all good things, to end in right loving. That was the reward.
This is where I think I start to lose people because c’mon Autumn, there are surely other ways to that end.
And I think you are right. I do. There are other ways we aim to transform the intellectual and aesthetic natures of our children. We’ve been talking about them all season.
But do you remember episode two when I defended classical education as the queen of education using Aristotle’s four causes? If not, go listen to it. But if so, remember we have to take stock of what a child is and what we want a child to be.
A child is a person, but they’re immature. They have unformed minds and unformed loves. Climbing Parnassus was a journey to formed minds and formed loves.
And can I liken that to motherhood? Since you’re listening to me and about 95% of this audience is made up of mother-teachers?
There are a lot of ways one can learn virtue; that’s true. But if we replace Climbing Parnassus with Motherhood, I think we can all better understand the image. Vibrant, life-giving motherhood requires work and patience. It often feels like labouring up the side of a steep mountain (with children in tow!) and surely I could learn to be patient if I had to stand in line at the market every week but I’m really going to be changed top-to-bottom into a patient person if I’ve faithfully mothered three energetic children through fifteen winters in a very tiny city house. Motherhood takes us further up and further in in ways that are deeply formative and whole-soul changing. Yes, we know we could experience some similar changs in other ways but we also all know what we mean when we say motherhood has changed us in ways beyond our understanding.
Climbing Parnassus is like that. And the classical tradition says Latin and Greek are the climb.
Romans and Greeks had a certain way of doing education. Some of it sounds familiar to our home education and some of it, well, it sounds a little harsh on modern ears.
Education began at home and up until the age of seven or so, the child learning focused on literacy and learning cultural ideals and character training. Parents and tutors worked diligently. Plato wrote they did this so that “each child may excel, and as each act and word occurs, they teach and impress upon him that this is just, and that unjust, one thing noble, another base, on holy, another unholy, and that his is to do this, and no do that.” And when the children have “learnt their letters and are getting ot understand the written word as before they did only the spoken, [they] are furnished with works of good poets to read as they sit in class, and are made to learn them off by heart: here they meet with many admonitions, many descriptions and praises and eulogies of good men in times past, that the boy in envy may imitate them and yearn to become even as they.”
Is that not very Mason of him?
But this was the aim of their education: to put before the child that which was true, good, and beautiful, so that they might know it, love it, and imitate it.
Part of this was putting the great texts before the children in order for them to learn right responses. We talked about this quite a bit in the Men Without Chests virtue episode. Everything deserves an objective response and in so much as you respond according to that standard, you are feeling rightly.
This means, we’re not interested in young students’ responses to material. Okay, I mean, as mothers, sure, we’re interested in what our children are thinking and how they are responding to something. But as mother-teachers, we’re not focused on developing our students’ responses to the great texts yet. Their mastery of the languages in order to understand the texts was so they could understand the text. Yes, the point was that they learn to understand what they read so they would learn what was right in thought and feeling. Later, after maturing, they were invited to respond personally.
Nowadays, we love to focus on personal feelings about what we read or hear. We love to respond. We even love to act as though doing this is teaching children to critically think. But might I throw a classical curveball your way and say children are not mature enough to “critically think” and critically thinking is not the skill to which we aim. It’s comes as a gift of labour that one forms a critical mind: to be capable of understanding and assessing and comparing ideas. It is not, however, the skill or the point.
Children, back in the day, did begin their classical languages studies around seven. Education in any literary society must begin with language. WIthout words, ideas can’t take full form. They need to be clothed in words. It was Aristotle who said mastering language allowed for practical skills but also the enchancement of enjoyment in leisure.
Basically, language was useful for the work day while simultaneously cultivating the mind and soul. It reminds me of this wonderful picture I saw earlier this year of Cuban men rolling cigars while one man sat upon a tall stool reading a classic novel to them. Yes, the owner of the cigar factory paid a man to read to the rest of them to engage their minds with worthy ideas while they worked with their hands. Useful and cultivating.
So, where am I going with all of this? Kind of the same place I’ve been going all three seasons of The Commonplace. Education ought to form us; and then form is as important as the content.
Latin and Greek were taught for centuries (Yes, centuries. Put a pin here; I’ll explain why we ever stopped.) because they were different than the native tongue in remarkable ways. They were considered a unique tool to help students gain an understanding of words from the inside. By learning these languages, students were better able to speak precisely and beautifully. It hones judgment and brings order to our sentences in structure and style. At their best, they teach students “to weigh and value words which builds the habit of sober and cautious thought”. (Gildersleeve) When students spend years learning to translate Latin and Greek—often by translating passages that have shaped the Western world beyond comprehension—they learn a language, yes, but they come face-to-face with greatness in thought and word. And, we hope, they are formed in humility, perseverance, and imitation.
I like how Paul Elmer More so perfectly captured the practical and philosophical route of the classical languages when he said, “The sheer difficulty of Latin and Greek, the highly organized structure of these languages, the need of scrupulous search to find the nearest equivalents for words that differ widely in their scope of meaning from their derivatives in any modern vocabulary, the effort of lifting one’s self out of the familiar rut of ideas into so foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic exercise to the brain.”
And here we kind of come to the last point of this episode. We need to be pulled out of the familiar rut of ideas into so foreign a world. That’s why we talk about cultivating; in classical education, we are trying to sow seeds of culture.
This used to be more in line with education. We passed on norms; we inherited norms. We shared virtues and practices that made us a people. We didn’t judge solely on what is useful but also what is good and beautiful, and what will form us towards cultivated, whole-souled persons. As it’s been said, if we were to judge the world based only on what is useful, we’d be without roses and cabbages would be queen.
What is the use to learning Latin and Greek? I don’t know if we want to really say there is one. It’s hard not to, I know, the scores, the logic, the grammar, even the reading the originals in the original. But, no.
Why did—or does—classical education hold onto her languages? Like she holds onto her form, it is in hope of her students becoming fully human.
Allow me to quote a bit from Climbing Parnassus by Tracy Lee Simons:
‘Latin and Greek are not dead languages,’ J.W. Mackail once said. ‘They have merely ceased to be mortal.’ Parnassus—that resplendent symbol of inspiration, eloquence, refined polish, and grace—has lodged within the Western mind a majestic image of the Beautiful and the Unattainable. Its steep, forbidding peaks, its cloud-girt summits, stood out against the sky, throne of Apollo, abode to the Muses, and source of inspiration for untold pilgrims seeking artistic perfection and the peace that comes at the end of arduous achievement…Those suppliants knew and felt the power of the Greek proverb that ‘the gods sell all good things—for toil.’ Parnassus reminds us, even now, that we must struggle and sacrifice, even to become fully human. Few reach the crest. But it’s the climbing that counts.
Greek and Latin have claimed their rightful plinth within the hallowed precincts of our cultural pantheon. They too deserve the homage due to the undying. The classical tongues still provide corridors leading into the holier sanctums of our higher culture. For over two thousand years they have stood as twin gates before the foot of Parnassus. They have lent us the tongues of immortals. And they have kept the long, twilit memories of the Western world alive. Amnesia cripples. But elected amnesia destroys.
…The best education, the highest and most bracing education, does not scorn the ground; without the ground we cannot spot the horizon. Yet it doesn’t disdain the starts. It shows us how to be fully human—and to exercise all the powers proper to a human being. It bids us…’to trace the Muses upward to their spring.’
I’ll see you in two weeks.
_____
Okay, so I’m not finished. But that quote from Climbing Parnassus was such a great way to end that I had to play the music…but now I’m back. To tell you, very quickly, why we stopped teaching Latin and Greek.
So up until about the 1880s, most American high school students studied Latin and Greek. But in the 1880s, industrialists began to form a new type of college, designed more for labor in an industrialized world. Since classical education is not considered “useful” for such a place, those colleges stopped requiring Latin and Greek as entrance requirements.
Oh, I know. Latin and Greek had been base-level entrance requirements.
So, as it goes, if you could get into college without knowing Latin and Greek, high school stopped teaching Latin and Greek because why would anyone do that if they don’t have to?
Which is sad on its own but let me break it down a little more. Previously, to go into theological studies, one had to be able to, you know, read the works of the faith. Luther’s 95 Theses? Latin. Calvin’s Institutes? Latin. St. Augustine? Latin. Church fathers? Latin or Greek. But after 1880s? Well, to study those, one would have had to start learning Latin and Greek in college but that was a time and expense barrier many coudln’t overcome…so the seminaries had to stop requiring original texts be read in the original languages.
I could keep going. But what is lost in a translation? Even in a really good one? A great deal.
Want (more of) the good stuff?
Join 675+ mother-teachers in Common House (It’s like a Patreon, but better.) where we think deeply and learn together through full courses, bonus minisodes, monthly Q+A video calls, resources, and more!
