The Academic Case Against Latin
"But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire" (II Peter 2:22).
Up until the early 20th century, entrance into higher education in the Ivy League was Latin-based. By requiring Latin to get into these colleges, the elite screened out common people from access into the elite. This had been going on ever since Harvard was founded in 1636.
Most college-educated men could not speak Latin in 1900 -- or 1800 -- nor were they expected to. But they were forced to have a reading knowledge it at age 18 if they wanted to enter into the elite. This had been true ever since the late Middle Ages.
It was snobbery. It was also a form of occupational licensure.
The charade ended before World War I. Other entrance requirements were substituted for Latin.
Yet today, Christian homeschool mothers have sided with the long-abandoned charade. They are trying to keep the old flame alive: a dictionary-based, slow reading knowledge of Latin at age 18, never to be used again. They have adopted a hybrid called the classical Christian curriculum. The hard-core curriculum programs require that students learn Latin.
For my critique of the classical Christian curriculum, click here.
THE SEDUCTIVE LURE OF LATIN
What is the obvious sign of this surrender today? The futile attempt to revive Latin. Why force a child to master Latin rather than New Testament Greek? Greek will enable him to read the New Testament in the original -- an obvious benefit. But what is the benefit of Latin? Except for an historian of the ancient or medieval eras -- for whom there will be no paying employment -- Latin is peripheral. Yet it is seen as the mark of true learning.
Latin was the universal language of the Western Church, i.e., Roman Catholicism and early Protestantism. But that learning was deeply compromised with Renaissance humanism. At best, Latin will enable a tiny handful of highly skilled, highly motivated, and poorly paid Christian scholars to read fragments of the Latin Church fathers.
Parents should abandon the futile boast: "My child is receiving a classical education, just like the good old days." The good old days produced the bad new days, step by step. The assumption of intellectual neutrality is the Church's great enemy. Latin education was the primary agency used to spread this lie.
I see home school mothers who cannot read Latin, who have no intention of reading Latin, who are utterly uninterested in anything written only in Latin, buying Latin grammars to inflict on their hapless children. Why? Because somebody they trusted told them that "Latin is basic to a well-rounded education." To which I reply: "Latin was basic to the initiation process of pagan and/or deeply compromised academics to gain control over the training of each generation of Christian leaders in England and America."
Latin was a wedge used to separate Christian children from their parents. In the same way that the sex education fanatics today devise ways to keep parents from finding out what teachers are really teaching the children, so was Latin for six or seven centuries. To open the doors of ecclesiastical office and government patronage to their children, Christian parents had to surrender him to the Latin-based curriculum, a curriculum that rested squarely on the autonomy of man. The child was initiated into classical humanism by way of Latin.
What is nothing short of astounding is that there are dedicated Christians today who insist on doing this to their children. They insist on reviving the tool of their ancient enemies in the name of traditional education. But traditional education was Satan's own tool for capturing the souls of Christians as well as their inheritance. Satan's agents abandoned that tool only late in the nineteenth century, when it became clear that mass education was going to make the traditional Latin school obsolete as an initiation process for the elite. At that point, the humanists substituted the modern curriculum, based on Darwin, in which Latin plays no role. Latin has become a lost tool of learning. Let's keep it that way!
Is there a role for Latin? Only historical. If there were a self-conscious effort on the part of dozens of Christian schools to create a cooperative program for translating the 217 volumes of J. P. Migne's collection of the Latin Church Fathers, I would approve. Until schools adopt this project, it is foolish to indulge in the waste of time that a Latin curriculum involves.
The vast majority of children so initiated will learn only the equivalent of pigeon Latin. If a child cannot sight read a foreign language without a dictionary by age 14, then whatever benefits he has received from the exercise of learning that language are indirect, e.g., learning the rules of grammar. If someone is going to be forced to do this, then he should learn a language useful to Christians: Greek, first; Hebrew, second, and Latin only a distant third. But what do we see? Mostly Latin, with no Greek and no Hebrew. This is Renaissance pride in action.
BAPTIZED CLASSICAL EDUCATION
Classical education undermines Christian orthodoxy. Christian orthodoxy has tried to make classical education Christian for over eighteen centuries, and it has always failed; the reverse always happens. Classical education is a Trojan horse: Greeks bearing gifts. (By the way, the story of the Trojan horse does not come from Greek literature. It comes from Rome: Virgil's Aeneid. Rome also succumbed to Greek education, and The Aeneid was the supreme Trojan horse in this program of cultural conquest.)
This attempted reconciliation served as the basis for formal Christian education, beginning before 1100 A.D. The medieval colleges were built on this inherently shaky foundation.
Classical education begins with a premise: the student must learn the classics. The classics are pagan: Greek and Roman literature and philosophy. They were based on the premise that man is the measure of all things, that man's reason is ultimate. The rational side of the Renaissance was based on the same premise. (Its irrational side was also a revival of Greek and Roman religion: occult, magical, and either chance-based or fatalistic.)
Medieval Scholasticism was as committed to the classics as the Renaissance was, though without classical occultism and pornography. The Scholastics were committed academically far more to Aristotle than to the Bible, especially in their political philosophy. They worshiped at Aristotle's shrine. Prior to the eleventh century, medieval theologians had worshiped at Plato's shrine: neo-platonic mysticism. The Scholastics substituted Aristotle for Plato. There was some gain -- Aristotle at least was not a communist, as Plato was -- but not in the realm of men's presuppositions. For humanism, man is the measure, and man's mind is the sole valid instrument of measurement. The Bible denies this view.
From the beginning, the medieval university was committed to classical education, and from the beginning, rationalism and irrationalism (mysticism) undermined the Christian roots of education.
By the time of Oliver Cromwell and England's unsuccessful Puritan Revolution of 1642-59, the Puritans suspected that the curriculum of Oxford and Cambridge was against them, yet they did not seek to change it. They hoped that inward salvation and precise doctrine outside of the classroom would somehow make Renaissance rationalism Christian. Cromwell changed nothing at Oxford, even though, as Lord Protector, he was chancellor of Oxford. John Morgan writes the following in his survey of Puritan education, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1986):
Puritans did not venture far from the traditional academic routine. The structures of educational institutions, and the content as affected by Renaissance urgings, seemed to satisfy their need for an academic base. There can certainly be no doubt of the very limited effects of puritans to the legacy of the Renaissance, or in developing the human intellect in the Baconian sense of the 'advancement of learning.' . . . A novel theory of learning or education lay outside the necessities of a puritan blueprint for the future (pp. 305-6).
To indulge in classical education is to indulge in Renaissance education. To force a child to learn Latin as a tool of reading Latin classics is to encourage him to accept the educational premises of either medieval Catholicism or the Renaissance. Yet today's would-be Puritans have accepted the error of those Puritans who built Harvard. Harvard went Unitarian in 1804.
Christians know something is wrong with humanist rationalism, yet they seem incapable of breaking with the past. They teach it to their children through the classical Christian curriculum.
Professor Cornelius Van Til's system of apologetics -- the intellectual defense of the faith -- should warn us: the history of Christian philosophy has been one long compromise with the philosophy of autonomous man. From Plato to Newton, from Newton to Kant, from Kant to some cast-off liberal fad, Christian philosophers have sought to baptize humanism. Why? They hope to appropriate for Christ the anti-Christian philosophies of their day or an earlier day. They trust the natural mind of the natural man, refusing to acknowledge the enormous danger involved: the importation of alien philosophical categories into the Church. Christians for over 1800 years have surrendered education, and therefore the future (inheritance), to the humanists.
TWO SILLY ARGUMENTS
For half a century, I have been offered two silly arguments. I have been sent these recently, reminding me that there is no case for Latin.
First, if you spend years learning this dead language, you will learn the roots of English words. Answer: If you want to know the roots of English words, learn the 1,100 or so words that the SAT exam tests. Get a dictionary and learn the roots. Or buy this book, used.
Second, physicians need to know Latin to understand Latin-based words. Really? Then what medical school requires Latin to get into? Answer: none. Why take four years, or 12 years, of a student's precious time to learn a language that is required in no profession? Why not study extra biology if the student wants get a pre-med degree? Why not study more economics, mathematics, chemistry, or any other course? Why not study for CLEP exams, and quiz out of the first two years of college for $2,000? In short, why waste a student's time learning an academically and professionally useless language?
Here is the rule in academia (and everything else): if you have to know something, learn it by studying it. Don't learn it by studying something else. Time is valuable. Don't waste it.
CONCLUSION
Take Greek, not Latin, if you must learn a dead language. At least you can read the New Testament if you learn it really well. Latin is useless if it is used only to read the classics.
Classical education is humanistic. There is no such thing as a classical Christian curriculum. If you doubt me, click here: //www.garynorth.com/public/14403.cfm.