Why Learn Latin?

One of the questions that many people have about classical Christian education is: why learn Latin? Sometimes proponents of Latin reduce the reason for learning it to vocabulary, the fact that it is the mother tongue of more than 50% of all English words as well as being the language of science and law. However, let’s be honest, going through the effort of learning a foreign language to improve your vocabulary is a circuitous route to a bigger vocabulary!

At Regents, students learn Latin as a key tool for in-depth mastery of language. If you join a sports team, you will be asked to do drills. No one thinks that you will ever need to dribble two basketballs in a game; however, by dribbling two basketballs in practice, you develop the ball handling skills you need to excel in a game. This is the logic behind learning Latin. No, your child is not going to ever take a trip where he can guide you around a city with his fluency in Latin. However, his mind will be fundamentally changed by the process of learning, through Latin, what language itself is. This has startling results on academic performance. When the College Board compared the SAT scores of the group of high school students who also took the Latin subject test to the SAT scores of all other groups of subject test takers, the Latin subject test takers achieved the highest score on the SAT. (National Committee on Latin and Greek, 2014.)

Grace Burns, Regents’ Latin teacher in the Logic and Rhetoric schools notes that “the study of Latin is so much more than words.” Learning how another culture thought about the world and expressed themselves, and how Latin impacted literature throughout history are just a few of the reasons she is passionate about Latin. “A love of learning and language is the best thing I could hope to teach students,” she says. Ms. Burns has lots of hopes for the Latin Department at Regents, and her first goal is to begin a Classics Club (an optional group where we get to learn more about ancient culture and compete in Latin-themed competitions). She is also especially excited about continuing to develop the advanced Latin curriculum so that students who choose to continue their Latin studies will have the ability to enjoy “wonderful years ahead of them, including reading about the Roman civil wars, Vergil’s Aenid, the history of the Church through Latin, and as always some wonderful and beautiful stories of mythology.”

When asked for a parting thought, Ms. Burns turns to one of her favorite quotes from the Aenid: “facilis descensus Averno; noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;  revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est." And for those of us who never learned Latin:  “The descent into hell is easy - day and night the gates of hell are yawning wide; but to retrace your steps, to climb back into the sunlit realms, this is the struggle, this is the difficulty.” -Vergil, Aeneid