The Value of Classical Subjects in a Modern Education

By Amy E. Barr at The Lukeion Project

I spend a lot of time at homeschool conferences talking about the benefits of Latin and Greek during the high school years. People with limited time, money, and energy always want to know why they should bother with “dead” languages when live ones seem more exciting or at least more…modern. All things being equal, Spanish, French or Russian may seem more interesting and the restaurant field trips can be super tasty.

A few decades ago a good education, as had been the case for over 2000 years in a few big parts of the world, depended on a firm foundation in Greek and Latin. At the turn of the last century, for example, even an average high school graduate could handle a goodly paragraph of Cicero, Vergil or Caesar. Today, very few of even the most ambitious high school students will study these languages, and even fewer of them will study for more than two years. Have Latin and Greek fallen out of style? Are they finally dead?

When a student first tackles these languages for real (say, age 14 and older), she will not spend much time learning how to order food in Latin or driving directions in Classical Greek. Since these languages are primarily read, students jump in at a higher level and advance quickly. In only chapter 3 of Wheelock, for example, students learn Seneca’s wise observation that nulla copia pecunia avarum virum satia, “No amount of money satisfies a greedy man.” They then follow up with modum tenere debemus, “We ought to maintain moderation.”1 

Meanwhile, most beginner Spanish students are still working through the correct pronunciation of “Hello, my name is ____, what is yours?”

Because of inflection (changing the form of a word to reflect its purpose in the sentence) and because there’s little focus on a proper Roman or Athenian accent, a Classical language student must read everything syllable by syllable. Word order is very different in Latin and Greek so the student must become aware of sentence mechanics while she works out ambiguous case endings and tense markers.

The results? A student’s analytical skills will increase a thousand-fold as he practices his powers of deduction to decode the ever-changing language puzzles at hand. Progressing more quickly than he would in any spoken language, he rapidly learns to apply language mechanics and analysis to everything from math to music, English to exegesis, and Calculus to composition. Learning Latin and Greek will make a student analytical and logical by necessity. He becomes a person who “reasons.”

Look at how Cicero explains why we humans are different from animals to see the value of being a person who reasons: “But man—because he is endowed with reason, he understands the chain of consequences, observes the causes of things comprehends the relation of cause to effect and of effect to cause, draws analogies, and, connecting and associating the present and the future, he easily surveys the course of his whole life and makes the necessary preparations for its conduct (de officiis 1.11).”

Becoming logical, analytical and well-reasoned is just one beneficial side effect of Classical studies. Can you imagine the ripple effect of improving the quantity of thoughtful reasoning human beings in the modern world?!  Meanwhile, Classical subjects impact the quality of writing and composition skills, vocabulary, speech, and comprehension.  Estimates of how many words have entered English from Latin and Greek start with a conservative 60%. Those who are legal, medical or scientific professionals might say it is closer to 80%. The study of Classical language used to be the primary lens through which we could better understand the mechanics and vocabulary of English. Therefore, previous generations were so much better at our own language while we moderns flop around with a greatly diminished literacy rate.

The Princeton Review sums up: https://www.princetonreview.com/college-majors/64/classics

We can't overestimate the value of a Classics major. Check this out: according to Association of American Medical Colleges, students who major or double-major in Classics have a better success rate getting into medical school than do students who concentrate solely in biology, microbiology, and other branches of science. Crazy, huh? Furthermore, according to Harvard Magazine, Classics majors (and math majors) have the highest success rates of any majors in law school. Believe it or not: political science, economics, and pre-law majors lag fairly far behind. Even furthermore, Classics majors consistently have some of the highest scores on GREs of all undergraduates.

Teaching Latin and Greek is now on the decline in all public schools and almost all private schools. I believe this fact is symptomatic of something bigger than budget cuts. Consider the results:  reasoning, analytical, logical, independent learners and thinkers. These qualities are old-fashioned (nay, even dangerous) by today’s standards. Let me urge you to be old-fashioned. Master some Latin and Greek.

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Latin students compared to all other students on the verbal portion of the SAT:

	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Latin	672	674	681	672	678	677	676	678
All Students	507	508	508	503	502	502	502	501
French	638	642	643	637	637	632	631	633
German	626	627	637	632	632	627	630	626
Spanish	575	575	573	577	574	565	557	561
Hebrew	628	630	620	623	622	611	619	612

1 Wheelock, Frederick M., and Richard A. La Fleur. Wheelock's Latin. New York: Harper Collins, 2011. 29. Print.