Parents sometimes ask us, very politely, why their eight-year-old is learning Latin. It is a fair question. Latin is a dead language. Nobody in Arizona speaks it. Nobody is going to hire her to translate a papal encyclical. What is the point?
The point is not that she will speak Latin. The point is what Latin does to a mind that spends twelve years with it. Latin is the most efficient mental gymnasium the Western tradition has ever built. It is the grammatical and intellectual backbone of the whole classical curriculum, and there is no adequate substitute for it.
Latin teaches you English
The first surprise is that Latin students become better at English. Roughly sixty percent of English words come from Latin. Almost all of our formal, scientific, legal, and academic vocabulary does. A student who knows Latin does not need to look up malevolent or benefactor or circumlocution. She can see the roots. She knows that mal- is bad and bene- is good and -lent means wishing and -factor means doer. She has been given a key to half the dictionary.
English itself has no grammar worth teaching in the way Latin grammar is taught. We do not decline our nouns. We do not really conjugate our verbs. A student can grow up speaking fluent English without ever learning what a direct object is. Latin does not allow that. In Latin, you have to know what a noun’s job is in the sentence because the form of the word changes based on its job. Subject, direct object, indirect object, possessive, preposition-object — they are all different forms. You cannot fake it. Learning to read a Latin sentence teaches you, permanently, how sentences work. That knowledge transfers to English and to every other language the student ever learns.
Latin teaches you logic
Latin is the first formal system most classical students encounter. It has rules, and the rules have to be applied in order, and mistakes produce obviously wrong answers. This is more like math than like English class. Students who study Latin from the Grammar stage on are doing something very similar to mathematics — manipulating symbols according to rules to produce meaning. It is no accident that Latin students tend to do well in math. The two subjects train the same habits of mind.
Grammatica loquitur; Dialectica veritatem docet; Rhetorica verba colorat. — Grammar speaks; Dialectic teaches truth; Rhetoric colors the words. (Medieval mnemonic for the Trivium)
Latin opens the tradition
Here is the deeper reason. Latin is the language of Western civilization for about 1,800 years — from Cicero to the Second Vatican Council. Every major work of philosophy, theology, science, and political thought from the Roman Republic through the early modern period was written in Latin. Augustine wrote in Latin. Aquinas wrote in Latin. Newton wrote in Latin. The Magna Carta is in Latin. The Summa is in Latin. The liturgy of the Roman Rite is still in Latin. If you want to read any of this in the original, you need Latin. If you want to be independent of translators and commentators, you need Latin.
A student who has studied Latin for twelve years does not have to trust someone else’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions. She can go to the text. She can see what Augustine actually said, in the Latin he actually wrote, and judge for herself. That is the difference between a tourist and a citizen of a tradition. Latin is what makes you a citizen.
Latin is hard, and that is the point
Latin is not easy. Students struggle with it. They do their declensions and hate their declensions and come back the next week and do them again. This is good. A classical education wants students to encounter subjects that are hard and not give up. A subject that is easy teaches nothing about how to do hard things. Latin is hard in the right way — hard enough to stretch the mind, structured enough that the student can see herself making progress, important enough that she can see why it is worth the struggle.
We have seen the transformation many times. A student who began Latin in the third grade arrives at the tenth grade able to read Virgil’s Aeneid in the original. She knows she can do hard things because she has been doing them for seven years. She knows the Western tradition is not a foreign country because she has been speaking its language the whole time. Whatever else happens to her in life, she has that. It does not go away.
What about Greek?
Greek is also wonderful and many classical schools teach it, especially in the Upper School. But Latin comes first because Latin is closer to English, because Latin has a more useful daily vocabulary for an English speaker, and because the bulk of the Western intellectual tradition after 200 A.D. is in Latin rather than Greek. We teach Latin from the Grammar stage on, and we introduce Greek where students and faculty are ready for it. Both are good. Latin is the necessary one.
So when a parent asks us why her eight-year-old is learning Latin, the answer is: because we want her, ten years from now, to be able to open Augustine and read him directly. Because we want her mind trained by the most rigorous language in the Western tradition. Because we want her to know that she is a citizen of a civilization that is older than America and wider than the present moment. These are not small goods. Latin is not optional.
