Tag: homeschool

Many homeschooling families use a Classical curriculum that teaches the Classical writers mostly in English and maintains Classical language learning as a stretch goal. This article is in no way critical of them or of their approach. These families are doing so many things right. They are homeschooling. They are teaching a liberal classical view of the world. They are inculcating the ideas and ideals of the Founding Generation into the Next Generation.

Most families who want to teach the Classics to their children have no other choice than teach it in English. Classical languages found barren soil in the government schools from the beginning of public education a hundred and fifty years ago. Life was drained from these programs gradually. Most schools that still taught Latin by the 1950s did not teach Greek. Students might get two years of Latin, far less than what had been required to enter university just twenty years earlier. The Classical entrance requirements for college were not seen to be progressive. The wealthy still got the required languages in private schools and went on to university. The less affluent public school kids were excluded. The solution to the problem of expanding access to college was not to improve Classical language teaching in public school. The solution was to strip the requirement from any college or university that took government money, or, eventually, any school that had a student with government loans. The standards were lowered.

For a period, the Catholic church continued to offer the classics, but eventually, the Church dropped the Latin liturgy and that avenue for learning the languages also closed there. Learning Greek and Latin became the stretch goal it is today. A Victorian secondary education was not available anywhere in the United States by 1974. What incentive remains fifty years later for families to stretch into teaching and learning Classical Languages? Teaching what the Founders knew about republican democracy is available in English. The stretch and scope of ancient philosophy is too. Knowing the classical languages has a value beyond just reading the classical authors or learning what the Founders knew.

According to the Manhattan Institute, “Today, classical education is synonymous with authoritative, traditional and enduring. ¹  The teaching of ancient Greek and Latin languages and literature endures, but the designation “classical” has been broadened to include languages and literature beyond Rome and Athens that uphold the virtue of “excellence.” Educators today define classical education as an education that teaches the best of the West.”

Much of the canon of literature until the 19^th century was written in these languages. The entire body of learning could not be abandoned just because people could no longer read it. Herculean efforts in the 20^th Century converted these texts to English. Once the translation was recognized, people began to teach that text in English. The world language of Greek had faded into Latin, and then that global language faded into English.

English is the world language today. Most international business is done in English and almost all business done in English speaking countries too. The Internet functions with an English backbone. Many industries like Air Traffic Control and software engineering function primarily in English. India uses English as the lingua franca, as the bridge language across the 22 official languages with state or local recognition in India.

This is a natural progression. Greek was once this lingua franca. The rise of Greek culture was so dominant beginning 2,522 years ago that even when Rome conquered Alexander’s empire 2,100 years ago, it allowed the Greek language and learning to continue alongside Latin and the Roman learning. Greek spread with the Roman Empire. Jesus, living under this Roman umbrella probably did not speak either Latin or Greek, but the Roman founders of Christianity, like the Christian writer Paul, was a literate Roman citizen and when he wrote the Gospels he wrote them in Greek. The reach of Rome spread Greek learning and consequently Christianity to the edges of the Empire to Britain and Gaul by the first millennium.

The Christians desired to read texts in the Greek through the Middle Ages when the works of the Classical authors had been lost. The works of the Classical authors remained in the Greek speaking Byzantine empire. The fluency in Greek in the west allowed educated men to read the classical authors when they were rediscovered at the beginning of the Renaissance centuries later.

OK. So that is the reason for continuing to know a language after it has fallen from usage. There might be something to rediscover in the future. Latin is more recently discarded, but the same logic applies. Latin was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire. Consequently, all business and government was conducted in that language. So was literature written in Latin until Dante dared to write “The Divine Comedy” in common Italian. Latin was the language for any serious writing for a thousand years. Latin survived the Dark Ages better than Greek. Law was still practiced in Latin through the colonial period of America and the Catholic Church still used the Latin Bible. Men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who wanted to practice law, even in the colonies, had to become fluent in Latin. This fluency allowed them to read the rediscovered Classical Roman authors like Cicero, Cato, and Horace. The Classical ideas of these philosophers and politicians from the Roman Republic and those of Marcus Aurelius informed their liberal revolution. Just as the Greek fluency of medieval monks and educated men of the 15^th Century allowed the rediscovery of Plato and Aristotle, of geometry and ancient political history, so also the fluency in Latin allowed the educated men of the 18^th century to rediscover the writings at the foundations of the Athenian democracy and the Roman republic.

That is the history, but all of the Classical Tradition and Christian Gospels have been translated into English today. Most of the translations are adequate and all of them have been vetted for centuries, so any limitation on the English Aristotle or Cato the Elder are well known. Modern homeschooling curricula can teach all the ideas that informed Galileo or John Locke without requiring years of learning dead languages. The content of what is translated is not adequate. Why then bother to learn to read Greek and Latin?

Christian scholars give us the best clue as to why homeschool parents should go the extra lengths to teach the languages. Translation is imperfect. Translation from Greek to English is structurally difficult. Christian scholars continue to work to clarify the problems with the translation of Bible text from Greek to English. For a simple example:

 ^ʹ ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος ^NA28

It is commonly translated: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. Nevertheless, the word θεὸς does not have a definite article “the” in the text. Some people would have translated that a “a god”, but no Christian translator would have drifted down this path. What the text says can be taken as polytheistic. The fact remains that there is no one to one correspondence between Greek and English. Translators have to fill in the gaps. Without being able to access the primary texts in the original languages, the scholar cannot know whether the translation is decent.

The best reason to learn the original language is to hear for ones self what Aristotle, Plato, and Cato the Elder said and to have a fundamental understanding of what that meant. It gives the modern reader a glimpse into those ancient worlds. It might not mean anything when talking about the trade goods to Britain in 35 A.D., but reading Cato’s original speeches might make a difference in understanding what it means that the fundamental rights of individuals do not come from government, but are inborn. Even the non-believer can see that Rousseau took the idea that individuals are born with certain rights that nobody has the authority to take away and he took the ideas from the classical writers.

The purpose of learning the Classical Languages during a Classical Education is that it allows the student to read through a passage like the following quote from Edmund Burke transparently and know what point in law he was making about the English Constitution, a mostly unwritten nest of laws in British Common Law and Statute. Then, to decide what that means in contemporary America.

Burke said,

”On this principle, the law of inheritance had admitted some amendment in the old time, and long before the era of the Revolution.² Some time after the Conquest great questions arose upon the legal principles of hereditary descent. It became a matter of doubt whether the heir per capita or the heir per stirpes was to succeed; but whether the heir per capita gave way when the heirdom per stirpes took place, or the Catholic heir when the Protestant was preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a sort of immortality through all transmigrations,—

Multosque per annos
Stat fortuna domûs, et avi numerantur avorum.

This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.”

So, to all my lovely homeschooling friends, even if you must learn the languages yourself in order to make the goal, the stretch goal of learning Classical Greek and Latin, that stretch goal is worth stretching toward.