“An educated person is far more than merely what they know or what skills they have; it is how they use the skills they have cultivated. That’s not something that can be taught or controlled by teachers or a school administration. All I do as a teacher is teach Latin, but I have no control over what my students do with that knowledge.”
This is so true!
Thank you also for calling out Utilitarianism for what it is—a failed philosophy of life.
This was great to read. Having taking the advice directly from Charlotte Masons volumes to learn latin, I trust her enough to know, without knowing the why, to do it. But this was really helpful to understand why coming from a real classicist!
We are the heirs to our patrimony. For a bricklayer that’s to be skilled in the art of bricklayer, to be strong & with a sensitive eye, and for the merchant it’s be honest & risk-tolerant. For those of us who are literature scholars, if we are to be proper stewards of our inheritance, we must be skilled in our trade. We must know our patrimony’s languages & know its lore. So I am learning Latin & Greek, and I plan to teach it to my children, because I wish for us to be Faramir & not Denethor or Boromir, impressive as those two both were in their own ways.
Love the echoes of Lewis here - what are we “using” Latin “for”. We are so very modern! We cannot unsee a way to simply exist with things or to learn them simply because we *want* to and for no other purpose! Enjoyed this and all your stuff for Lit Life pod!
Bravo! (And I took classes under Feeney - he brought everything alive.) And I should explain why I say, ‘Bravo!’ This is absolutely the elephant in the room for classical schools. There are so many different needs/interests to meet (-school choice anyone?)
Latin and Greek were the mainstay of the curriculum for centuries because they are so wonderful in content and so functional for developing verbal and reasoning skills. However, we must remember that until relatively recently, only a fraction of the population was at school… That’s not where we - or the average family - live today. The classical school movement has a huge challenge to develop something that genuinely addresses and builds Latin/Greek study but that also considers our range of students. IMHO…
There's something of a parallel to the Greco-Latin relationship in the relationship between Sanskrit and Chinese. Like the first pair, the second pair are linguistically and conceptually very far apart, not to mention their geographic distances. But also like the first pair, the second pair came into being through a cultural relationship, a desire of the latter to emulate and participate in the glory of the former, and also like the first pair, the latter came to signify a kind of combined package of "classics" that circulated far in excess of the initial relationship (to Southeast Asia, China, Korea, Mongolia, Japan, and Indonesia).
As a Latin teacher, I teach the language as a foot in the door to a large world of antiquity that includes everyone, and I make sure the students know that I'm not trying to push a "Western Civ" model of thinking about the past on them. As it happens, I find that this increases rather than decreases their love for "the West," partly by seeing how inseparable it is from "the East."
I learned ancient Greek and Latin w my two children. My eldest asked me many times that he wanted to learn the language of the Gods.
So at one point I contacted the Classics Department at our local university and found Kimberly, an amazing tutor whose love of grammar and the classics was infectious.
We met with her for two hours every week for 7 years up until Covid. We even let our eldest skip school to attend college classes w her.
I miss though days to be honest. My kids picked these languages up easily whereas I had to study everyday.
I hope at some point they look back at that time as special.
Sadly, there's no reason for anyone to learn Latin or Greek unless they want to spend their life reading texts in those languages. We're failing to teach basic reading and writing in English, and in that environment all the arguments based on learning 'Latin and Greek helps you do x better' are really a luxury because the house is on fire. Also, in a world in which AI overshadows everything, I think students' time is better spent learning AI tools than it is on dead languages. Being able to read Herodotus in the original is a wonderful skill, but it is also professionally meaningless unless you want to complete a PhD, write a dissertation in multiple scholarly articles, and grab the brass ring of a tenured professorship. Almost nobody who enters an introductory Greek course is going to do that.
So sorry to pierce your bubble of privilege, but 99% of people make decisions about what to study in college based upon what they feel will be useful to them after college.
Up until a few decades ago, when tuition was lower and there wasn't a massive glut of PhDs crowding out the job market it was possible for a young person to spend years studying Latin or Greek and take it on faith that their career would just sort of work out, and if they didn't make it as a professor they'd somehow still wind up with a decent job.
Now you'd have to be insane to make such a calculation. It's worth acknowledging that we have closed out this option by refusing to tax the wealthier members of society to keep tuition low. The ability to study knowledge for its own sake is a luxury, but our culture and society are poorer now that we've stopped giving students a realistic opportunity to do this and still put food on the table.
“An educated person is far more than merely what they know or what skills they have; it is how they use the skills they have cultivated. That’s not something that can be taught or controlled by teachers or a school administration. All I do as a teacher is teach Latin, but I have no control over what my students do with that knowledge.”
This is so true!
Thank you also for calling out Utilitarianism for what it is—a failed philosophy of life.
This was great to read. Having taking the advice directly from Charlotte Masons volumes to learn latin, I trust her enough to know, without knowing the why, to do it. But this was really helpful to understand why coming from a real classicist!
We are the heirs to our patrimony. For a bricklayer that’s to be skilled in the art of bricklayer, to be strong & with a sensitive eye, and for the merchant it’s be honest & risk-tolerant. For those of us who are literature scholars, if we are to be proper stewards of our inheritance, we must be skilled in our trade. We must know our patrimony’s languages & know its lore. So I am learning Latin & Greek, and I plan to teach it to my children, because I wish for us to be Faramir & not Denethor or Boromir, impressive as those two both were in their own ways.
Love the echoes of Lewis here - what are we “using” Latin “for”. We are so very modern! We cannot unsee a way to simply exist with things or to learn them simply because we *want* to and for no other purpose! Enjoyed this and all your stuff for Lit Life pod!
Bravo! (And I took classes under Feeney - he brought everything alive.) And I should explain why I say, ‘Bravo!’ This is absolutely the elephant in the room for classical schools. There are so many different needs/interests to meet (-school choice anyone?)
Latin and Greek were the mainstay of the curriculum for centuries because they are so wonderful in content and so functional for developing verbal and reasoning skills. However, we must remember that until relatively recently, only a fraction of the population was at school… That’s not where we - or the average family - live today. The classical school movement has a huge challenge to develop something that genuinely addresses and builds Latin/Greek study but that also considers our range of students. IMHO…
There's something of a parallel to the Greco-Latin relationship in the relationship between Sanskrit and Chinese. Like the first pair, the second pair are linguistically and conceptually very far apart, not to mention their geographic distances. But also like the first pair, the second pair came into being through a cultural relationship, a desire of the latter to emulate and participate in the glory of the former, and also like the first pair, the latter came to signify a kind of combined package of "classics" that circulated far in excess of the initial relationship (to Southeast Asia, China, Korea, Mongolia, Japan, and Indonesia).
As a Latin teacher, I teach the language as a foot in the door to a large world of antiquity that includes everyone, and I make sure the students know that I'm not trying to push a "Western Civ" model of thinking about the past on them. As it happens, I find that this increases rather than decreases their love for "the West," partly by seeing how inseparable it is from "the East."
I learned ancient Greek and Latin w my two children. My eldest asked me many times that he wanted to learn the language of the Gods.
So at one point I contacted the Classics Department at our local university and found Kimberly, an amazing tutor whose love of grammar and the classics was infectious.
We met with her for two hours every week for 7 years up until Covid. We even let our eldest skip school to attend college classes w her.
I miss though days to be honest. My kids picked these languages up easily whereas I had to study everyday.
I hope at some point they look back at that time as special.
Great last line 😊
I’m so thankful to have you as my daughter’s teacher.
This is amazing, Dr. Phillips!! Thank you for sharing all your knowledge with us!
Sadly, there's no reason for anyone to learn Latin or Greek unless they want to spend their life reading texts in those languages. We're failing to teach basic reading and writing in English, and in that environment all the arguments based on learning 'Latin and Greek helps you do x better' are really a luxury because the house is on fire. Also, in a world in which AI overshadows everything, I think students' time is better spent learning AI tools than it is on dead languages. Being able to read Herodotus in the original is a wonderful skill, but it is also professionally meaningless unless you want to complete a PhD, write a dissertation in multiple scholarly articles, and grab the brass ring of a tenured professorship. Almost nobody who enters an introductory Greek course is going to do that.
I’m afraid you’ve fallen into the exact trap of utilitarian thinking Anne warned us against.
So sorry to pierce your bubble of privilege, but 99% of people make decisions about what to study in college based upon what they feel will be useful to them after college.
Up until a few decades ago, when tuition was lower and there wasn't a massive glut of PhDs crowding out the job market it was possible for a young person to spend years studying Latin or Greek and take it on faith that their career would just sort of work out, and if they didn't make it as a professor they'd somehow still wind up with a decent job.
Now you'd have to be insane to make such a calculation. It's worth acknowledging that we have closed out this option by refusing to tax the wealthier members of society to keep tuition low. The ability to study knowledge for its own sake is a luxury, but our culture and society are poorer now that we've stopped giving students a realistic opportunity to do this and still put food on the table.