Not Dead Yet

Latin & Greek are Still Practical

By Amy Barr, dir. Latin at The Lukeion Project

I spend a lot of time at home school conferences talking about the benefits of Latin and Greek during the high school years. People 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 Italian seem pretty interesting and the restaurant field trips can be downright tasty.

Just a few decades ago people seemed to intuit the value of Classical languages.  Then a good education, as had been the case for hundreds of years, depended on a firm foundation in Greek and Latin to ensure a literate and logical mind. At the turn of the last century, for example, even an average high school graduate could handle Cicero, Vergil or Caesar with enough finesse to make a professor proud. Today, even the most ambitious high school student will rarely feel motivated to study these languages for more than two years. Have Latin and Greek fallen out of style?

Let’s look at why Latin and Greek have been foundational since Alexander the Great was just average. When a student first tackles these languages at an advanced level (say, age 13 and older), he will have to experience transformative intellectual changes before he can successfully decode the foreign sentences in front of him. This is a fancy way of saying that Greek and Latin students must jump into the deep end grammatically. There shouldn’t be much time learning how to order food in Latin or driving directions in Classical Greek. Since these languages are primarily learned for the purposes of reading (wherein lies the most benefit), students jump in at a relatively more complex level and advance quickly as they learn decoding skills. Though there are “natural” spoken-Latin programs out there, before moving to Golden Latin authors, a student must master Latin grammar no matter what.

In only chapter 3 of Wheelock, for example, students learn Seneca’s wise observation that nulla copia pecunia avarum virum satiat, “No amount of money satisfies a greedy man,” and therefore modum tenere debemus, “We ought to maintain moderation.”1 Are these lifechanging ancient ideas? Not necessarily but they are also not quick and easy exchanges of basic ideas as is common with learning modern spoken languages.

A Classical language student must always read everything syllable by syllable. This means her analytical skills will increase a thousand-fold as she practices her powers of deduction to decode the ever-changing language puzzles at hand. Progressing more quickly than she would in any spoken language, she 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. She becomes a person who reasons.

Look at how Cicero explains why we humans are different from animals: “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. These subjects certainly have an impact on 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. This is why previous generations were so much better at our own language.

Studies conducted by the Educational Testing Service show that Greek and Latin students consistently outperform all other students on the verbal portion of the SAT based on data from the past decade.2 These same studies show that Classics majors tend to have a higher GPA at the college level and have accelerated performance in nearly all other subjects such as math, music and history. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, students who major in Classics have a better success rate getting into medical school than do students who concentrate solely on science.3 Classics majors also have the highest success rates of any majors in law school.

Latin is now on the decline in all public schools and most private schools. Good luck finding more than a couple of years in most programs. Classical Greek is nearly extinct except at The Lukeion Project. Since 2020, even the small offerings of these topics have stretched so thin that students rarely accomplish more than the basics even as schools extend the period of those basics from two years to three. The Lukeion Project has maintained the traditional high school pace that was the norm 20 years ago.

Consider the results: reasoning, logical, independent learners, thinkers, auto-didacts. Such nonconformists are poorly valued by a world that prefers cookie-cutter educations followed by lack-luster jobs. Home educators and some subsets of conventional students not only grasp the value of these skills but make every effort to achieve them.

Latin and Greek are still fundamental and Cicero was right about anybody who can think analytically: “he who is endowed with reason understands the chain of consequences, observes the causes of things,…easily surveys the course of his whole life and makes the necessary preparations for its conduct.” Golden Latin and Classical Greek aren’t dead. They are still bringing to life the brilliant intellects that we desperately need to frame our future world.    

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

2 Annual reports from College-Bound Seniors — A Profile of SAT Program Test Takers from years 1999-2005, 2007 available at http://www.bolchazy.com/al/latadv.htm#sat

3 http://www.princetonreview.com/Majors.aspx?page=1&cip=161200

Totally Epic

Ancient but Valuable Life Lessons

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

The first powered airplane only flew 12 seconds on its maiden voyage and the first car could only move 2 miles an hour. The first Greek epic, however, was invented even before the finishing touches were put on the Greek alphabet in which it would eventually be recorded. Homer’s Iliad, and his smash sequel the Odyssey, have been moving the world ever since, all while being composed in a form of poetry known as dactylic hexameter. 

You probably have a copy of one of these epics on your bookshelf. You may even have tried to work them into your curriculum with varying levels of success or frustration. With a little background in place, most readers quickly learn that this 3000 year-old literature still offers food for thought and potent words for modern ears.

Troy, known as Ilion/Ilium to the Greeks and Romans and Truva to the modern locals, is a real place you can visit in northwest Turkey. I worked with the excavation team at this well-fortified Bronze Age city and witnessed how most tourists climb the giant Trojan Horse replica for a fast photo before hastily leaving. The site of Troy is no Coliseum or Parthenon because its claim to fame is its destruction. Archaeological evidence suggests that something calamitous happened there around 1180 B.C. when the city was nearly leveled. The relevant parts of the archaeological site look as one might expect for a long destroyed city.

Fast forward around 400 years to find Homer, a blind Greek-speaking poet living in Ionia (western Turkey), earning his keep by reciting a larger-than-life poem about heroes and fair Helen at ill-fated Troy. After the city falls, the Greeks make their way back home. Odysseus has so much misfortune that the poet composes a second epic to cover his 10-year trip back to Ithaca. While Homer included some very reliable details, he also filled in the gaps with tidbits from his own time and a big dash of imagination. He was, after all, making a living in the story-telling trade.

By the 1800’s most scholars dismissed Homer, Troy, and the whole gang, as pure poppycock, asserting all of it had been invented by some ancient creative committee. Puffing their scholarly pipes, they wrote-off a lot of ancient literature as silly figments of antique imagination. Luckily Heinrich Schliemann, a German publicity-loving entrepreneur, got in touch with Frank Calvert who firmly believed he was living at the actual site of Troy. These two began the tradition of using archaeology to vindicate ancient literature while stuffy institutional scholars ate crow.

The Romans believed the Trojan War was their starting point as a civilization. According to tradition, Rome was founded exactly 438 years after the fall of Troy (Velleius Paterculus 8.5). One of her founding fathers, Aeneas, would lead a gang of Trojan refugees from the burning city and settle them near what would eventually become a point of argument for Rome’s namesake Romulus and brother Remus. Be sure to add Vergil’s Aeneid to your reading list if you want the whole epic picture.

The heroes of Homer’s epics lived by a code which would guide behavior from Homer to Alexander the Great.  Uninformed readers might conclude the Trojan War was about stolen Helen or lost love. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the heroic code that would drive hundreds of Greek ships against Troy, compel Achilles to sit angrily in his tent, force best friend Patroclus to take Achilles’ place on the battlefield and push an army to blockade a city for a full decade.

C. M. Bowra summarized the heroic code this way: 

The great man is he who, being endowed with superior qualities of body and mind, uses them to the utmost and wins the applause of his fellows because he spares no effort and shirks no risk in his desire to make the most of his gifts and to surpass other men in his exercise of them. [i]

The Romans would add their own flair to the heroic code. Vergil’s Aeneas, for example, embodied Roman pietas, a virtue which admonished us to put God, community, and family first before self.

While monsters and swashbuckling adventures keep the reader happy, Homer’s Odyssey is teaching the big life lesson that we are each defined by our generosity to strangers. From prince to farmhand the rule is the same: if you treat strangers with kindness, you’ll be remembered well. Hero Odysseus also teaches us to handle trouble with long-suffering patience so that we’ll eventually make it home safe.   

Ancient epics are an important addition to your reading list. They are a gold mine for further thought and discussion if we don’t insist our kids start on them too young. I recommend waiting until your reader is in the critical thinking stage (13+) because of the weighty issues presented in these stories. Parents will enjoy reading the epics with your junior or senior high student. My favorite translations are by Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo.

Originally performed from memory and accompanied by a stringed instrument, these tales were the blockbusters of the ancient world and the backbone of ancient Classical education. I leave you with the important words of Penelope, wife of Odysseus, spurring us on to generosity, 

For how would you ever find out, stranger, whether or not I surpass all other women in presence of mind, if you sit down to dinner squalid and disheveled here in my hall?  Our lives are short. A hard-hearted man is cursed while he lives and reviled in death. But a good-hearted man has his fame spread far and wide by the guests he has honored, and men speak well of him all over the world.[ii]

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[i] C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience, New York: 1957, pp.20-21

[ii] Stanley Lombardo, trans.,  Odyssey, Hackett Publishing Co., 2000. 19.359-367

AI is Sneakier Than You Think

Learn to Turn it OFF

By Randee Baty at The Lukeion Project

As I design my AI policy for my college students this semester, my new stand is “I don’t believe it’s inevitable that all students will use AI. I do believe it is inevitable that all students will have to have the ability to think and write clearly on their own even when no computer is available.”  That’s the stance we’ve taken against AI-completed homework from the beginning here at The LukeionProject.

Studies are already beginning to show that students using AI have a cognitive decline in their ability to complete assignments on their own. We are not willing to have that happen to our Lukeion students. We are continuing the mission we’ve had for 20 years to turn out well-trained, clear, and independent thinkers. Leave the AI for arenas other than homework.

But for students, that’s actually getting harder and harder to manage because AI has become pervasive in the digital tools we use, such as Word and Google docs, without our even knowing it. All kinds of AI are being subtly and not-so-subtly integrated into these programs. Students often truly believe that they didn’t use AI because they didn’t instigate a chat session with ChatGPT or with Copilot, but they were undermined by their own software. What can they do to prevent being accused of using tools they didn’t know they were using?  Let’s go through how to turn all of that off, something that is required when submitting homework to The Lukeion Project.

First, let’s be clear about one common program that many students use. Grammerly is AI. 100%. If you run a paper through Grammerly, you are using AI and it will show up as such. No way around that. Other programs that are supposed to help with the same types of issues, such as Quillbot, are also 100% AI. They just can’t be used for homework at an AI-free school such as The Lukeion Project. For Lukeion homework, be sure that those types of programs are not running or affecting student work.

A good rule of thumb, anything that wants to write into the homework itself should not be used. We wouldn’t let students have other people complete their homework for them and allowing these programs to do so is the same idea as letting some other person do the work. Students need to learn how to write without these crutches. Proper punctuation and sentence structure, word choice and vocabulary, level of formality and point of view, organization and development of an argument are all things we are teaching explicitly and that students have always been required to learn without digital intervention. AI tools may not be available when they need them, and students must be able to produce strong writing without them.

How to use Microsoft Word without AI:

The obvious first thing to do in Word is to turn off Copilot. Versions of Word differ from computer to computer, but to turn off Copilot on mine, the path is File-More-Options-Copilot and then I just uncheck “Enable Copilot.”  It’s easy and it stops Copilot from annoyingly asking me what I want it to draft for me when I don’t want it at all. But that’s not the end of the AI in Word.

Go back to Options and open the Proofing Menu. Go down to “Writing Style” and open the “Grammar and Refinements” menu. On that menu, leave basic things such as spell-check. That is a rule-based system. When you get down to “Clarity,” “Conciseness,” “Formality,” “Inclusiveness” “Sensitive Geopolitical References”  and “Vocabulary,”  turn all those off. Those are where Word wants to impose its will on you. These are the exact areas we’re teaching, and students should be learning to deal with them correctly on their own without Word telling them what’s right, what’s wrong, and what it prefers. Leaving them on could result in your paper showing up as AI written.

If you use Editor in Word, be sure you are only using it for spelling and light grammar corrections. Once you move into the rest of the things that Editor wants to correct for you, you are into AI.

Here’s the other problem with taking the suggestions of these programs at face value. They are often wrong or merely preferences. Each time I put something like “Write a 300-word paper…,” AI suggest I change that to “Author a 300-word paper…” or “Draft a 300-word paper…”  Those make far less sense to me than just saying “Write.”  It shows me how much control the program is trying to exert over my writing and frankly, it just makes me mad.

How to use Google docs without AI:

As with Word, basic spell check is fine. In fact, we hope students are using spell-check. That is a rule system, not AI. Keep the “show spelling suggestions” and “show grammar suggestions” on.

In the Tools menu, click on “Preferences.”  Here is where you can tell it to turn off suggestions. Different versions of docs have different looks. Mine has “Show smart reply suggestions” which I have to disable not to be getting suggestions as you write. Yours may have things such as “Writing suggestions.”  Turn that off. This is where you can also turn off things such as “Automatically correct spelling.”  I don’t mind it underlining a word that it thinks is spelled wrong, but I want to make my own decisions about correcting it or not. These rule-based tools often have problems with foreign words or proper names, so don’t let it do anything automatically. Be in charge of your own paper!

In my version of Google, I have to explicitly turn on Gemini, Google’s AI, and I just don’t. Double-check that your version does not have it turned on by default or because someone turned it on, thinking it would help. If it is making suggestions, it’s turned on and you need to turn it off on purpose. Anything that says, “Help me write,”  “make suggestions,” or auto-generates phrases or sentences must be turned off. If you see writing suggestions in light gray as you type, ignore them and figure out how to turn them off!

Smart students have been learning how to write well without AI intervention since writing began. You will too, and your assignments will be the better for having come from your brain and not a program that only knows how to search the web and pull things together from there. It’s fun to think!  Enjoy knowing that you are producing your own work that is far superior to anything an AI program could give you.