LATIN
LATIN IS NOT OPTIONAL by Cheryl Lowe
hen you ask a fellow teacher or homeschool parent what classical education is, you're likely to get a different answer every time. To one person it is the study of history chronologically, to another it is simply a challenging academic curriculum. To many, particularly in recent decades, classical education is seen as the application of Dorothy Sayers' developmental model—the grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages of learning. What is the sine qua non of classical education? Translated literally, sine qua non means "without which not." What is the thing "without which" an education would "not" be classical at all? This was the question asked in an issue of The Society of Classical Learning's (SCL) Journal. "What," it asks, "are the sine qua nons of classical education?" There were many answers proposed in the SCL Journal articles. In one, E. Christian Kopff eloquently explains the depth of confusion around this question. He relates the story of attending a meeting of classical educators at which a pastor in the audience asked, "At my school we use Saxon Math and Writing Road to Reading. What else do we need to be classical?" It was inquirers like these whom Tracy Lee Simmons must have had in mind when he pointed out, "We apply 'classic' or 'classical' to anything we believe to be excellent or universal." But is that all it is? One of the first things to do when you are looking for what a term means is to look at how it was used historically. What was the original meaning of the term "classical education"? Until recently, classical education meant only one thing: The "older definition of classical education,"
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Cheryl Lowe was the founder of Memoria Press and the author of the Latin Forms Series, Classical Phonics, and many other books. She also founded Highlands Latin School in Louisville, Kentucky, where all Memoria Press materials are developed and tested.
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Latin Is Not Optional
said Simmons, was "a curriculum grounded upon—if not strictly limited to—Greek, Latin, and the study of the civilizations from which they arose." If you reread the debates that took place in the early twentieth century, when classical education was under attack from progressives, it was the teaching of Latin and Greek, and whether these two languages were still important in the modern world, that was the central flashpoint of the debate. The chief argument of the progressives was that the classical languages were outdated. The use of these languages to read the classics was simply unnecessary, they argued, given the wide availability of English translations. But classical educators knew that these arguments assumed a narrow view of the benefits of classical languages. This is why, when classical educators met at Princeton College in 1917 to try to regroup their forces in the face of the progressive onslaught, they chose to take their stand on the benefits of Latin. Two books which eloquently communicate the enormous benefits of the study of the classical languages are R. W. Livingstone's A Defense of Classical Education (1917) and Charles Bennett's The Teaching of Latin and Greek in Secondary Schools (1900). In fact, it was these benefits of Latin that were a centerpiece in the document that rebooted classical education in the late 1980s—Dorothy Sayers' essay "The Lost Tools of Learning." That essay, and Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Douglas Wilson, together spawned the modern classical education movement. And those who consider Sayers' stages of learning as the thing that makes an education classical would do well to heed her advice as to how to conduct the first of these stages: Let us begin, then, with Grammar. This, in practice, means the grammar of some language in particular; and it must be an inflected language. The grammatical structure of an
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