NCLG

How Students Benefit from Classical Civilization Courses

Certainly it is a challenge for anyone developing curriculum today to present to students a fair and balanced representation of the world's cultures, past and present. In southern California, we are particularly sensitive to the diverse ethnic backgrounds of our students and to the need to make education relevant to a broad spectrum of students. Yet, we also know that we have the responsibility to provide an education that is sound and flexible enough to prepare students for multiple careers and that gives students the skills that they need to succeed in an increasingly complex, interdependent, and multicultural world. Communication skills, both in English and in foreign languages, are one key to success. A tolerance and understanding of other cultures than one's own is also helpful. The ability of students to make reasoned decisions in politics, ethics, business, science, and in personal relationships can be acquired and strengthened by learning the significant achievements of the past, particularly within their own culture.

As the Roman orator Cicero said: "The person who is ignorant of the past remains forever a child." In our ethnically diverse classrooms today, it is especially important that students be drawn into the mainstream of their common culture, that they learn the history, traditions, mores, and values of the civilization in which they live, and that they also be encouraged to make meaningful comparisons with others. Classical civilization offers students 2,500 years of human experience in the sciences, arts, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, government, and ways of living.

The civilizations of Greece and Rome are a heritage shared by North and South Americans, Europeans, many African nations, and others throughout the world who trace their ancestry, history, language, culture, or system of education to the classical world. Some 750 million people living in 57 nations on four continents are primary speakers of a Romance language, related directly to Latin in form and structure. Latin is the source of 65% of all English words and 90% of those over two syllables. Moreover Latin is the basis of about 80% of Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian words and thereby serves as a useful key to literacy for this entire government, sciences, arts, and philosophies, and intellectual concepts of ancient Greece and Rome. In fact, many writings of the classical period were preserved though the European Dark Ages by Arabic-speaking peoples.

In North America, as in the Roman empire, international trade, travel, wars, migrations, literature and educational opportunities abroad bring new ideas and cultural interactions to our shores. Moreover, the electronic media continue to hasten the exchange of ideas and spread contact and interaction with other cultures at an unprecedented pace. One example of these cultural influences is a dramatic increase in the number of third world nations seeking to adopt a representative form of government and which use a European language such as English, French, or Spanish as the "lingua franca" of world trade. These are outgrowths of our Graeco-Roman heritage.

Classical civilization courses are by nature global, multicultural, interdisciplinary, and comparative. Moreover, the focus is upon people, ways of life, and the lessons of human experience, so to that extent the subject is said to be humane. Courses in classical civilization can reach beyond the borders of  Greece and Rome to embrace other cultures of western and eastern Europe, Asia and North Africa, which in time became part of the Roman Empire. Two successful programs that I know of compare and contrast the cultural and intellectual centers of Rome and Alexandria. Increasingly, courses in classical civilization address issues of gender, ethnicity, contacts, and interactions between cultures.

An effective course can capture the imagination of students, so that they come to recognize that ideas, concepts, and cultures change over time, that some useful ideas are retained, that civilizations, like people, live, flourish, and die, and that civilizations may be built one upon another in the course of history. Above all, students can learn which cultural institutions succeeded over time and which did not, which lifestyles and ways of thinking were useful and not, and how they might apply some of these lessons in their own lives. Students can benefit from studying a cultural history that is significant in the world and which endured and spread over time. These concepts are a useful counterweight to the modern notion that everything was invented yesterday and that all progress lies in the future. If we want our students to function in life as mature, reasoning adults, we need to provide them with access to their own rich cultural history, to a record of significant human achievement in the world, and to foster tolerance and appreciation for cultural similarities and differences among peoples.

Our cultural traditions are too rich and complex to be left entirely in the hands of children. Students in secondary schools have a greater capacity of conscious acquisition of knowledge and for integrating and making use of a broad spectrum of information in their lives. If we allow students to lose contact with their perspectives on the past, what will follow is a loss of exposure to and interest in classical literature, arts, and languages, which provide direct access to the roots of their culture. Latin programs, for instance, are likely to dwindle if classical civilization courses are removed from the schools. Latin fosters such basic mental processes as observation, accuracy, analysis, and logic. Students learn to manipulate complex sentence structures that function differently from English in some ways and similarly in others.  As a result, students acquire greater mental agility, a readiness for acquiring related Romance languages, as well as modern inflected ones, and achieve greater mastery of English. Latin students have intensive practice with word roots, prefixes and suffixes which are the keys to vocabulary acquisition in English and the Romance languages. Since students do not  know which languages they might need in their future careers, why not begin at the beginning with Latin, a language which has no native speakers?

These are the reasons why Latin enrollments in public secondary schools nationwide in the U.S. have risen about 15% and more than doubled in the middle schools since 1985. A growing number of elementary schools, as well, are using Latin as a bridge to the acquisition of English and modern languages. One indication that Latin gives students an edge is that Latin students nationwide consistently score higher than students of other languages, including German and Russian, on the verbal portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for college entrance. A desire to build stronger communication skills and to function in the mainstream of our culture are major reasons that students today elect to take Latin.

Virginia Barrett
National Committee for Latin and Greek

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