“You study Latin? When on earth are you ever going to use
that?”
Every student going to a classical school has heard this gibe at one point or another. It is inevitable, like running into someone who thinks pineapple on pizza is a good idea. In our economic and outcome-centered age, learning a language of no immediate, practical use seems like a colossal waste of time, money, and effort. A student should spend hard-earned hours on doing something advantageous, like Spanish; something that will give a return on the investment. (It’s rather essential if you want to manage a fast-food restaurant in the Southwest, after all.) Latin will only give you a career if you somehow make the one-in-a-million shot of working for the Vatican, or if you teach it to some other poor saps. The “useless subject”
ad hominem goes double for Latin teachers—they have all the day-to-day relevance of a gender studies professor, without nearly as much street cred. “Not only is your subject useless,” runs the popular thought, “but worse, you have somehow conned people into paying for it.” Classical school administrators face a barrage of objections from parents whose children find Latin boring as well as useless; this, in a subject that is often seen as the
sine qua non of classical schools. In the face of this triad of objections—Latin is impractical, a bad substitute for a modern language, and boring to boot—what is the importance of studying it in the 21st century?
There is an answer to that question, but before we reach it, it is worthwhile to note that this same friend, acquaintance, or worried parent never raises the same question about basketball. Sports are seen as a universal positive. But are they really all that different? Compare for a second: basketball will only provide you with a steady career—a return on all that time investment—if you are either the one-in-a-million who can play professionally in the NBA or you coach a team somewhere at a high school (where you rub shoulders with that Latin teacher at staff meetings). It is of virtually no “practical use” other than fat prevention; there are far easier and less involved ways to keep off the pounds. And standing on a court dribbling or shooting yet another free throw, for hours on end, cannot be categorized as anything besides boring—and that leaves out warming the bench! Why are administrators never pestered about why their child has to play basketball? The answer has to do with the philosophy of education: what is a school, and school work, for? We raise no furor over basketball because around the end of the 19th century the idea of
mens sana in corpore sano (“a sound mind in a sound body”) and the innate character-building qualities of genteel collegiate athleticism gained traction, and now they are commonplace. It is accepted that part of a school’s job is to care for the body, and so sports are expected and often required. But what is the point of a child’s mental development?
Here is where the “useless” or “impractical” objection really stems from. Underlying it (and providing it with all its impetus, as well as snark) is the assumption that education exists to provide the student with career opportunities. This mindset is most prevalent around colleges, but exists in primary and secondary schools as well. If the purpose of schooling is to load a child’s brain with usable, easily marketable data that transfers easily to a career path, then Latin does not meet those criteria. Simple enough; that is why it fell out of favor in the first place. But this particular assumption about education is increasingly challenged in the modern day—particularly by the very classical schools that make Latin such a centerpiece of their curricula. They posit that education is about developing far more than career skills—it involves likes and dislikes, character, truth, reason, tastes, goodness, skills, beauty, etc.; in short, all of life. What benefit does studying Latin give in such a scheme of study? The usual arguments in favor of learning the language (boiled down to their essence) generally fall into three categories: first, acquiring Latin is immensely useful in dealing with other languages, particularly English. Second, it works the brain in ways other subjects usually do not, as well as building character through hard work. Third, it allows access to a myriad of original sources. We will examine each of these points individually, noting strengths and weaknesses of each in an educational environment in the 21st century, to show that Latin truly is a worthwhile endeavor.
The First Claim: learning Latin is worthwhile because it is immensely useful in dealing with other languages, particularly English.
This claim is most often made by those trying to defend against the attack on Latin as “useless”; they can refute their opponents by showing a measurable, practical benefit to spending some time in a classroom trying to conjugate all those persnickety verbs. First, they point to the advantages of working on Latin before moving on to another language; of mastering the concepts of subject, person, case, gender, neuter, etc. in the Roman tongue before attempting, say, Greek or French. This is actually a fairly good point for their side, because Latin (unlike virtually every other currently spoken language) is highly regular in form. The men who created and enriched it were engineers without equal; hard, practical men who often had little time for philosophy and nuance. Generally, Latin actually follows its own rules. Anyone who finds this point underwhelming obviously never had to learn to pronounce the word
slough (not to mention
cough and
bough, and
dough) around fifth grade! Therefore, it takes comparatively less time and effort to master the basics (since there are few exceptions), which makes it an ideal commencement to second language acquisition.
Even better, because Latin is a “museum language” there is no changing idiomatic context to confuse with the classroom version; that is, a student will never have to figure out how to switch between “proper” Latin and “real-world” Latin the way he would using a modern language, and he does not have to worry about a word changing meanings.
[1] As a point of comparison, consider the poor student sweating through learning English in a classroom. His teacher may tell him that the proper way to ask his friends a question is, “Would any of you care to proceed to the movie theater?” and as far as it goes, she’s right. But asking the question that way instantly marks him as an outsider. Additionally, as soon as the question changes to the far more common “Y’all wanna go see a movie?” he is forced to deal with slang, bad pronunciation,
synedoche, a missing conjunction, and an uncommon 2nd-person plural…on top of an accent, if he’s far enough South. This is why modern languages, to be mastered, must usually be learned by immersion—speaking the language as it is actually spoken, under mental pressure, for large amounts of time. It is not practical for most high schools (and even some colleges) to do this with Spanish or Arabic. But they can do it with Latin, because it is a regular, largely unchanging tongue--it can be learned in the tight parameters of a classroom, in five hours per week.
The second part of the first point is that it aids in manipulating English. This is true as far as it goes; English has been heavily influenced by Latin (and by languages that came from Latin) and a student who has mastered some basic Latin words will probably do quite well on the vocabulary portion of the SAT. A student reading this essay (for instance) who has never taken any of the language might stumble over some of the earlier inclusions that have grown common in English such as
sine qua non or
et cetera. A Latin vocabulary can be helpful in English vocabulary; a quick survey of the first paragraph of this piece discloses around twenty words with Latin roots that even a casual Latin student would have no problem spotting, like
immediate or
practical. The obvious flaw with this point is that a student with a dictionary can acquire exactly the same vocabulary, with far less labor; there is no inherent benefit from Latin itself.
[2] The manipulation argument grows slightly stronger if the student intends to venture into English from an earlier era: works from two or three hundred years ago are Latinate not only in vocabulary, but also in structure. A reader used to relative clauses and out-of-sequence sentences will have a much easier time than the one who has only dealt with modern English (because he was too busy learning to order a taco over in Spanish I). But since both of these can occur outside of any study of Latin, and possibly more rapidly without it, I am skeptical of their value in persuading study in the modern day.
The Second Claim: Latin is worth studying because it works the brain in a way other subjects usually do not.
My own experience and the testimony of a number of Latin teachers lends support to this theory.
[3]Unlike history, which tends to confine itself to memorizing facts; or math, which tends to focus on sustained process reasoning; the subject of Latin combines both memory (vocabulary) and regular processes (cases, conjugations, and modification) with the key additional factor of translation. In order to describe one thing in terms of another, a student must know both on a far deeper level than the superficial. This becomes even more the case if the school’s program includes speaking as well as a written element. All of us have dealt with the situation where we know the material in the notes but cannot verbalize it at a question from another; Latin, as a language (unlike math, for instance) is a splendid opportunity to force the brain to bridge that gap. The resulting mental development is perhaps comparable only to achieving fluency in music. Of course, any translation-heavy language course would give this result; but since most modern language classes are focused on safely functioning in that language’s society, they tend to avoid the impact Latin can have. “Where’s the bathroom?” only becomes a valuable piece of information to the brain if you actually happen to need to find one in a foreign language. But figuring out the beautiful variety of ways to say
quod scis, nihil prodest; quod nescis, multum obest in English (and comparing them with classmates’) is a challenge far more like a group puzzle than a boring question, and therefore ultimately more memorable.
[4] So the mental agility mastering it can create is a valuable contribution of learning Latin in our day and age.
On a charitable reading, this is what is actually meant by some other proponents when they state that Latin is “a mental workout” or “intellectual discipline” and is therefore valuable solely on that account.
[5] This approach is usually advanced against the “boring” argument noted earlier—even if students do not manage to learn much of the language, the mere effort involved is beneficial. To put it another way, Latin offers all the benefits of sustained brain teasers, but with the added advantage that you might get an additional language to throw on your resume, too (if you’re lucky). The problem with stating the issue like this is that Latin seems to become the classical equivalent of hauling rocks from one side of the yard to the other—sure, it’s boring and useless, but look at the muscles students develop! This particularly becomes the case when the teacher is using the grammar-translation method of memorizing bare rules and endings and charts. All the students come out the other side with fast mental muscles (they’ll remember
amo, amas, amat until the day they die) but no ability in Latin itself. Students have a right to complain if this is actually what is being done to them—they are being asked to devote a significant portion of their short lives to something (mental agility) that can be developed in far more entertaining ways; say, the daily
New York Times crossword. So by itself, the brain argument seems to be insufficient to drive the study of Latin, though it is a great supplement to the next argument of fluency.
The Third Claim: Latin is worth studying in order to access the original sources.
This is the strongest and most obvious of the three, and the whole reason the language was part of the original “classical” (that is, medieval and Renaissance) education in the first place. European scholars long needed to be able to do two things: access the wisdom of Cicero, Boethius, or Livy in their own words, and communicate what they uncovered there to other scholars. In the days long before television and mass media largely standardized language, the amount and variety of dialect scattered over Europe must have been bewildering. Latin provided the answer: a universal tongue of learning that joined the educated across the continent. Even after the rise of the vernaculars it remained important; Francis Bacon insisted on having his
Essays and other works translated and published in Latin as late as 1625, “for these modern languages will, at one time or another, play the bankrupt with books” and he wanted them preserved for posterity!
[6] Though English fulfils the universal language role for us, there is still something to the argument of reading so many great works in their original format. The objection that there are many excellent translations is the objection of someone who has never learned enough of two different languages to realize what a yawning gap there is between them. A translation is an excellent telescope to look at the other side, but it is no substitute for walking there yourself. And for the effort involved, Latin probably unlocks far more original works than any other language, since it was the tongue of the educated of an entire continent for over a thousand years (including a multitude of ecclesiastical tomes for the Christian). When the
ad fontes argument is combined with the other two reasons for studying Latin, it becomes nearly unbeatable.
The great objection to this third reason is, of course, that very few students emerge from a Latin program able to actually read a primary text, which would render the third point moot and the other two points suspect. How can all that time studying be vindicated if only one or two ever manages to actually pick up and enjoy the
Aeneid? My response is twofold. First, the normal alternative (modern languages) has a track record just as bad—how many students of high school Spanish or French remember more than a few oddball phrases a decade later? Second, this is looking at the problem through the wrong lens. Think back to basketball again. No one brings up this problem about the school sports team, though the odds that someone will be a star basketball player are far lower than someone learning to read Virgil! The key point is to give the students the opportunity to bounce a ball, and then see if they have the skills and the wish to chase that dream even further. It is true that out of any given class, only about 75% may have the capability to master any subject, and only 25% have the drive to be able to do so. But that is no excuse for not giving the top quarter the tools needed to grasp Latin, since the benefits (as above) are so great. It is no more elitist than the NBA. The lower part of the class will develop due to the first two reasons: language competence and brain work. The higher will achieve all three, and be able to revel in primary texts. We should do all we can to increase the latter percentage, but in the same way short people will never be basketball stars, it is unrealistic to expect every single student to achieve fluency, since many lack either desire or capability.
The problem is also artificially magnified by the paucity and quality of instruction. We must recall that the educational goal of reading Latin has been neglected long enough to die out of living memory—no one already knows how to do it well anymore. Most current Latin students learn from a teacher who can barely read primary texts himself, if at all. How do they expect him to take them where he cannot go? Latin has only been a newly-desirable school subject for about thirty or forty years—about three possible generations of teachers. The first generation knew very little Latin and admitted it, the second benefitted from their mistakes and has created some much better resources and techniques than existed when they were students. It is to the third generation, as they enter the educational world, that we should look to truly start producing aptitude. Until then, griping about lack of competence is merely noticing where we are in the recovery process.
In Conclusio
So rather than being boring, useless, or impractical, Latin has a number of advantages. It is a tangible link to the past, opening innumerable pages of material from the West and Christendom. It is a scholastic exercise that, pound for pound, produces more mental agility than most other subjects, particularly if it is taught well. And even if neither of these occurs, it will still produce a marked improvement in cognition and comprehension of English, which is certainly practical, useful, and interesting (at least until a politician starts using it). Why should you study Latin in our modern, 21st century schools? Because if you don’t bother, Cicero said it best:
quod scis, nihil prodest; quod nescis, multum obest.
NOTES
[1] At least, not in classical Latin, which is the version most schools are worrying about in the 21st century. Throwing in medieval and ecclesiastical Latin might give some bumps here.
[2] See, for instance, Douglas Wilson,
The Case for Classical Education (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003) 141-44, or Cheryl Lowe, “Top 10 Reasons for Studying Latin” at https://www.memoriapress.com/articles/top-10-reasons-studying-latin (accessed 8/26/2022) where it forms the substance of half of her ten points, with “mental discipline” covering the other five! This argument seems to be advanced most often by those who came to Latin late in life and never learned it in depth; the fact that it was helpful for their vocabulary (and a lot of hard work) does not mean that Latin is worthy of study on those grounds alone. There are better ways to do either.
[3] Jonathan Roberts, “Classical Schools are Not Really Classical” at https://ancientlanguage.com/classical-schools-not-classical/ as well as various personal conversations.
[4] Cicero,
Orator xlix. Roughly, “That which you know does not help; that which you do not know is an obstacle.” This says nothing of all the possible historical and philosophical tie-ins that can accompany the study of Latin—icing on the cake one might say.
[5] Wilson,
The Case for Classical Education 139-40 and Lowe, Top Ten Reasons.
[6] Francis Bacon,
Essays (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1884) xviii.
.jpg)
