Why study a language that no one speaks anymore?
It’s one of the most common questions we hear in classical schools, and below, Jordan Adams from the curriculum and instruction team at the Barney Charter School Initiative offers an answer:
Jordan Adams’s Top Reasons to Study Latin
- Latin is a giant puzzle. It forms the minds of students to reason well through things. This translates into other subjects, too, and helps reading and writing skills generally.
- Students who study Latin earn higher scores on tests like the SAT.
- Latin is a great language to learn before studying other languages. Everything else seems easy by comparison, and on top of that the romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese) are all derived from Latin.
- But the main reason we teach Latin is to be able to read ancient Roman and medieval writers in their original language. So much of what we talk about in classical education is a commentary on Ancient Greece and Rome, and there’s no better way to understand those places than by reading those sources in the original languages.
Listen to the whole interview, and all of our podcasts, here.
