William Sitwell, praising the decision of the British Department of Education to cease funding the Latin Excellence Programme (LEP), recently wrote in London’s The Telegraph that “the loss of Latin from schools is a triumph, not a tragedy,” explaining that “the ancient language has little relevance in today’s society.”
No one in America would have been more eager to join Sitwell than John Dewey (1859-1952), arguably a greater influence on American public education than anyone else. In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey wrote that literary culture was “aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men” and nothing more than an “alleged humanism” that “bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class.” Members of this culture “reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which tend to shrink to ‘the classics,’ to languages no longer spoken.”
Although Dewey acknowledged a place for Latin and Greek based on “the important contributions” those civilizations have made to our own, he also wrote that to regard the classics “as par excellence the human studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery.” In short, the classics – and the languages in which they were written – were not only impractical but because they were inaccessible to the masses, therefore, in no way preeminently “humanistic.”
I don’t know how strong the influence of Dewey’s pragmatism has been on the other side of the Atlantic, but Sitwell certainly represents it. “What those Latin classes did do,” Sitwell writes, “was fill my childhood with countless hours of pointless education when I should instead have been forced to study the likes of economics, business [and] entrepreneurialism.”
I have nothing against economics, business, and entrepreneurialism. In fact, I’m all for them. But I don’t think they ultimately make us human. What makes us human is the capacity to probe what lies beyond such practical endeavors and the willingness to ask “big questions.” What makes us human is not the ability to come up with the best business model, but to understand why we even engage in business in the first place. What makes us human is ultimately not what we make, but who we are and who we become.
Such was the thinking of Erasmus of Rotterdam, among many other eminent humanists, whom Sitwell dismisses as “a gloomy Dutchman with a propensity to contract lumbago. . .before succumbing to dysentery.” Perhaps. But Erasmus also dedicated his life to education, and more specifically to the bonae litterae (“good letters”), which he believed not only dealt with the “big questions” but empowered us to acquire virtues that would make us excel both in public life and in the life of contemplation.
As for “economics, business, and entrepreneurialism,” Erasmus issued a perennial warning: “Anyone who actually admires money as the most precious thing in life” and believes that “as long as he possesses it, he will be happy, has fashioned too many false gods for himself.” (The Handbook of the Militant Christian, 1514).
For all his “lumbago” and “dysentery,” Erasmus was a far less gloomy figure than Sitwell’s teachers, who seem ultimately to blame for his deep distaste for Latin. Mr. Scott, Sitwell’s instructor at Maidwell Hall, wrote that if the ten-year-old Sitwell could only “understand the concept of hard work, he would do very well in Latin.”
The irony of Mr. Scott’s comment and of Sitwell’s characterization of Latin as a “futile game” is that Erasmus thought with good reason that learning should be a game, because games are supposed to be fun: “A constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some extent afford pleasure to the participant.”
Perhaps the problem today is that we consider hard work and fun as opposites.
Not so my mentor, Fr. Reginald Foster, OCD, who considered them synonymous. Born into a family of plumbers in 1939, Foster fell in love with Latin thanks to the School Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Anne’s Parochial School in Milwaukee. His poor, working-class background was no impediment to a high-caliber primary education. “Reggie” eventually went on to write Latin for four popes and devise an ingenuous way of teaching the language. He was convinced that the harder you worked, the more fun you had.
And he was absolutely right. I never worked harder in my life than I did in his class, but neither have I ever had more fun.
The difference between my experience with Fr. Foster and Sitwell’s with Mr. Scott just might reveal a deeper difference between the American and British experience with Latin. There was no fifteenth-century Renaissance in America, but there was definitely one in the twentieth. Non-public schools – most of them Catholic – offered Latin in urban and rural classrooms across the country.
Latin may have been their students’ ticket to the university, but that’s not what motivated the priests and nuns who worked for virtually nothing to hand it on. They were rather convinced that Latin was worth possessing both for its own sake and as a door to the inestimable treasure of humanistic wisdom.
Many pupils I know from that era went on to become accountants, businessmen, and entrepreneurs. I have yet to meet one who regrets having to learn Latin. To the contrary, they all attribute much of the virtue and intellectual acumen they gained to Latin. Though they never found a “practical” use for their skills with the language, they would be the last to say it was useless – or that defunding it should be considered a “triumph.”
Most importantly, it did not take an act of Congress to give poor, working-class kids the opportunity to study Latin in America. It only took missionaries like the School Sisters of Notre Dame.
