In the homeschool arena where I grew up, knowledge of Latin was considered the hallmark of a well-educated child. As a mother who now is immersed in homeschool and private school social circles, I hear Latin’s praises sung on a regular basis, especially, and understandably, in those families and groups with classical approaches to learning.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that in the homeschool community Latin has become the mark of homeschool success—if your children can master all the Latin declensions, you’re doing something right, and if not, well, you’re not doing education as well as the mother whose children can.
There’s a lot to be said for studying Latin. It is a shame that it’s not more widely available in public schools.
However, allow me to share my controversial opinion as to why you shouldn’t study Latin. Or, more precisely, why not everyone should study Latin, so long as one fills the time spent not studying Latin with some other meaningful study.
My mom was one of the few who listened to my sister and me when we, after a year of studying Latin in middle school, told her that we did not want to learn it anymore. We were enrolled in a homeschool co-op that championed Latin, but we did not enjoy it and were eager to learn different languages instead.
Our mom, against the prejudices of the other co-op mothers, let us break away from lingua Latina. We finished out our high school years studying German and, for our final two years, studying Mandarin Chinese while our family lived overseas in Japan.
The switch from Latin to German and Mandarin ultimately gave substance and direction to my childhood fascination with travel and foreign cultures, paving the way for my collegiate and professional endeavors. Little did I know at the time that, due to Germany’s importance in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, knowledge of the German language would be important to my future career as an intelligence officer. And even a few years of Mandarin and Chinese cultural study would be a favorable attribute in the defense intelligence sphere.
One might counter that although modern languages like Mandarin and German have practical benefits, they lack the rich scholarly, literary, and religious contributions that Latin has to offer. While Latin is no doubt exemplary in terms of the literary, cultural, political, and philosophical contributions that it handed Western Civilization, it is worth noting that other languages have rich contributions of their own. In fact, the literary and philosophical interests I found in the study of German became the driving factor in my academic and career success, prompting hard questions that I still grapple with.
These questions arose from my college courses on German post-war literature (written shortly after World War II). As you can imagine, German post-war literature, or Nachkriegsliteratur, is quite dark and wrestles with questions about the nature of good, evil, and justice. Whether mentioned directly, metaphorically, or thematically, Nachkriegsliteratur is haunted by the terrible spectre of the Holocaust.
Evil is monstrous; justice is evasive; happy endings are always overshadowed by an ever-present potential for humans to commit atrocity. German literature suggests that the everyday, average man—each one of us—is prone to assuming complacency in the face of, and eventually partaking in, terrible brutality against our fellow man. Consider just some of the questions that arise from studying such literature: How do we handle man’s capacity for evil, given that it is so terribly great? What does the revelation of man’s dark side then mean for the government’s propensity to facilitate evil?
Studying German literature and history also raised interesting questions about America’s role in foreign conflicts—questions that were especially compelling to me as a military brat. I had always viewed America’s military legacy by and large as heroic, but I had also learned to appreciate the wisdom of George Washington and other founding fathers’ warnings about becoming involved in foreign wars and conflicts. I became perplexed by what the right course of action would look like for America when it came to involvement in foreign conflicts, genocides, and mass atrocities.
As a young college student, the question puzzled me: If an individual should stand up against things like Nazism and genocide, why shouldn’t a nation? Does genocide warrant military interventionism? Or is there anything that individuals, irrespective of military intervention, can and should do when atrocities occur in foreign nations? These questions motivated me to work toward a career in intelligence and national defense.
Studying German led me to wrestle with these questions central to human existence and motivated me toward a meaningful career. These tough questions prompted by studying Deutsch also prepared me for some of the horrors that would become sadly routine in my future career in intelligence.
As for my years as a Mandarin student? Though perhaps not as life-changing as the revelations offered by my study of German, studying Mandarin and the subsequent opportunity to visit China twice gave me a uniquely human perspective on what I later came to know professionally as a formidable threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During my time working in an environment in which China was considered the number one adversarial rival of the U.S. and the free world, I often thought back to markets in Xi’an and Beijing. While walking through these markets, I remember Chinese women counting my three sisters and I and then looking at my father with teary eyes.
In a society in which males carry higher status socially, legally, and economically—and in which the “one child policy” meant that pregnancies were often terminated when the family discovered they were having a daughter instead of a son—these women were touched to see a father who loved and cherished not one but four daughters. Walking through those markets was one of the first times I can remember seeing my mother weep.
I often think back on this experience, both to remind myself of the humanity of the Chinese populace, and also to remind myself of the brutality and the totality of the PRC’s control of its own citizens. It’s a vivid testament to the integrality of freedom and how often I take liberty’s fruits for granted in my own life.
It suffices to say, studying Mandarin and German led me to find something about which I am passionate. The in-depth study of these cultures wrote the prescript to my career and intellectual interests—interests that I will pursue the rest of my life, whether professionally or at my leisure.
So, what does this have to do with Latin?
Well, the truth is that time is a limited and precious resource. And it’s a very wide and rich world that we have at our fingertips. In a perfect world, we could all fit in Latin, Mandarin, German, Spanish, Greek, etc., but that just is not a reality for most of us. So, please consider my experience swapping Latin for other modern languages as your reassurance that if you think you or your children’s time would be better spent pursuing something other than Latin—go for it.
Remember that while many appear to consider Latin the holy grail of education, the most important aspect of any education is a disciplined mindset that pursues knowledge with a hunger for truth and a sense of curiosity. Sometimes, this hunger for truth and cultivated curiosity might take you or your child on a journey that doesn’t include Latin, and that’s okay.
When you follow your God-given sense of curiosity and wonder, you’d be surprised at the questions and career interests you might inadvertently turn up.
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Image credit: public domain
