Latin at Emerson

Students today are taught to complete assignments.
Far fewer are taught to think.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a serious education began with Latin. It was not optional, nor was it regarded as a curiosity. It was the foundation on which every subsequent subject was built, and its absence would have rendered a young mind unequipped for the work of serious thought. John Adams learned Latin. So did Jefferson. So did Hamilton, Madison, and every student who passed through Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Eton, Rugby, Winchester, Oxford, and Cambridge in the centuries that produced the Western tradition we have inherited. Latin was to the life of the mind what arithmetic is to the sciences: the backbone.

The standard, in those centuries, was not what it has since become. In 1767, every candidate for admission to Harvard was required to translate Cicero and Virgil and to compose original Latin sentences with grammatical precision — before a single lecture was delivered. At colonial Yale, in the same period, English was against college regulations; students were expected to speak Latin in and out of the classroom. The educated men of that era did not merely study classical civilization. They inhabited its language, and their Latin literacy was, by most scholarly accounts, considerably more advanced than what is found among today's college graduates, and among many faculty outside the classics.

Emerson Latin exists because that backbone has been quietly removed from contemporary education, and because the consequences of its removal — for the formation of the mind, not merely for any particular credential — are not small.

The Missing Ingredient

A peculiar thing has happened to education over the course of the last century. Knowledge, once conceived as a coherent whole, has been broken into departments; the departments have been further broken into specializations; and the specializations, into techniques. A student today may pass through twelve years of formal schooling and never encounter, in any sustained way, the question of what a good life is, or what beauty is, or why truth should be pursued at all. He will learn methods. He will not often learn what methods are for.

This is what educators in earlier centuries meant when they distinguished intrinsic from extrinsic goods. An intrinsic good is something pursued for its own sake — the beauty of a well-turned Latin period, the satisfaction of seeing an argument unfold in Cicero, the steadying experience of reading Virgil slowly enough to hear him. An extrinsic good is something pursued because it leads somewhere else — a test score, an admission, a credential. Both have their place. But an education that pursues only the second, at the expense of the first, produces the peculiar modern phenomenon of students who are credentialed but uncultivated, trained but unformed. The extrinsic follows naturally from the intrinsic. The reverse is seldom true.

Latin, for most of Western history, was the discipline in which the intrinsic was cultivated first. A student who wrestled with Cicero did not do so because Cicero would help him apply to college; he did so because Cicero's mind, set beside his own, made his own mind larger. The college admission, when it came, was the consequence of a formation that had already taken place.

That is the ingredient we believe is missing. And it is missing, increasingly, even from the schools that once guarded it most carefully.

An Honest Reckoning with the Present

It would be unfair to suggest that Latin has disappeared. It has not. It is taught at elite boarding schools along the East Coast of the United States and in the United Kingdom, at classical academies whose numbers have lately and impressively grown, and in homeschooling curricula that serve hundreds of thousands of families. Each of these inheritors deserves its due, and the case for any of them is a reasonable one.

The boarding schools retain the prestige of the institutions they descended from, and many of their instructors are genuinely learned. The classical academies, often founded within the last thirty years, have done substantial work recovering the Trivium and reintroducing Latin as a subject of cultural and moral consequence; they participate, often enthusiastically, in national and international competitions that the elite East Coast schools frequently ignore.

All of this is to the good. It should be said plainly.

It should also be said, however, that the state of instruction in each of these quarters is not what the materials suggest. At the boarding schools, the Latin curriculum has, year by year, grown slower and thinner. What was once completed in three years is now stretched across four, then five; the grammatical sequence is scrambled, with topics introduced in orders that defy logical progression; class time is given over to projects on Roman daily life and mythology, which are pleasant but supplementary, rather than to the essential work of the language itself. Several well-known schools have quietly dropped the AP Latin curriculum altogether, and when they do teach it, they often teach only fragments. The reason, on close inspection, is not that AP Latin is unworthy of them. It is that their students, after five years of instruction, are not yet prepared for it.

At the classical academies and in many homeschool curricula, the ambition is real but the materials are often thin. Important grammatical nuances are treated briefly or omitted; authentic readings are delayed or abbreviated; the transition from constructed Latin to real Roman prose — which is the decisive moment in any Latinist's formation — is often postponed indefinitely.

And the methodological quarrels have not helped. The field has divided, with more heat than is warranted, between the partisans of the grammar-translation method and the partisans of the nature method. Each camp has a genuine point. Each tends to overstate it. The consequence, too often, is that students are served the method the school prefers, rather than the method — or combination of methods — that would most efficiently form them.

None of this is to say that the other programs are bad. They are not. Many are good. Our quarrel is not with them but with the gap between what they do and what they could do, and with the willingness, increasingly common, to call that gap acceptable.

CeleritasSpeed

Celeritas — speed — was the quality by which Caesar's contemporaries knew his leadership in Gaul. It did not mean haste. It meant that Caesar decided quickly, moved quickly, and struck quickly; that he trusted his preparations so completely that he could afford to commit; and that, by the time his adversaries had understood what he intended, he had already accomplished it. His bridge across the Rhine, built in ten days to cross a river that had taken his enemies twenty days to cross on rafts, is the emblem. It was not recklessness. It was a comprehensive logistical achievement in the service of a philosophy — that the general who moves faster than the terrain his enemy occupies is the general who wins.

Celeritas is the hallmark of our programs. What takes a conscientious boarding-school student three or four years to complete is accomplished in our programs in a single year, and in our summer intensive, often in a single season. This is not because we have lowered the standard. It is because we have raised it, and have done the work of arrangement that makes the higher standard reachable.

The arrangement is the thing. After years of teaching from nearly every major Latin curriculum in present use, and after comparing each against the classical approaches by which students of earlier centuries came to genuine mastery, we have distilled what is essential from what is incidental. The grammatical concepts are presented in the order in which they genuinely build upon one another, not in the order in which a given textbook happens to introduce them. The readings are selected for density and reward, not for the quantity of pages they fill. The student, in consequence, notices the patterns that underlie the language rather than memorizing its surface.

That is why the speed is possible. A student moving through a well-arranged curriculum is not being rushed; he is simply being spared the detours.

Our programs all converge on the AP Latin syllabus and beyond. Every course, from the most leisurely to the most intensive, is designed so that the student who begins at the foundation will, within a predictable horizon, encounter the great authors of Rome in the original — not in the fragments the College Board excerpts for the AP exam, but as whole authors, in whole works, with the context that makes them legible. The AP Latin syllabus we use has been audited and approved by the College Board. But the syllabus is an occasion, not the point.

Systematic, Comprehensive,
Accelerated, Rigorous

Four adjectives describe every program we teach — and their order matters.

The instruction itself is fully remote, conducted in small classes over Zoom, with every session recorded so that students in New York and London, in Seoul, Dubai, and Singapore, can participate alongside one another regardless of time zone. Class sizes are kept small by design, which is what makes genuine conversation possible; the best sessions are those in which a reading from Cicero opens onto a discussion of the nature of friendship, or law, or republican virtue, with the instructor guiding rather than lecturing. Private tutorials are available when space permits. Between sessions, students may request a personal video message from the instructor on any passage, any construction, any doubt — a small thing, perhaps, but one that parents and students have found to change their relationship to the subject.

The Long-Term Pathway

Every course at Emerson Latin belongs to a larger whole. From the first lesson of foundational grammar to the reading of authentic Roman prose and verse, the curriculum follows a designed progression — and every student knows, at every stage, exactly where they stand within it.

Latin and classical humanities competitions at every level of difficulty run throughout the academic year, and students across all three stages are eligible to participate. The preparation is built into the curriculum rather than added to it — what students demonstrate in competition is what the instruction has genuinely formed. We are institutional members of the organizations that administer these contests and manage registration and preparation from beginning to end. Students are entered for the competitions for which they are genuinely ready, on the judgment of the instructor.

Two Methods, One Mastery

A word is owed to the two methods whose quarrel has preoccupied Latin pedagogy for much of the last century.

The grammar-translation method — in which a student is taught the grammatical system of Latin explicitly, memorizes paradigms, and learns to translate from Latin into English and occasionally back — is the approach by which most serious Latinists of the last two centuries were formed. It has been the approach of the great universities and classics departments of the Western world. Its strengths are precision and transferability. A student trained in this method can, when he encounters a difficult sentence, identify what each word is doing and why — which is, in the end, what reading Latin actually requires. Students who think deductively, who are comfortable with mathematical, linguistic, or logical structure, tend to flourish under it. It is, in our experience, the method best suited to students who are drawn to coding, to mathematics, to philosophy, or to the analytic habits of mind those disciplines reward.

The nature method proceeds on a different premise. Rather than explaining Latin in the student's native language, it presents Latin sentences arranged so carefully that their meaning becomes apparent from context, from prior sentences, and from supporting visual and textual cues — much as a child acquires a first language, through comprehensible input rather than explicit instruction. Its strengths are fluency and ease. A student formed by this approach reads Latin with an intuitive quickness that is difficult to achieve by other means. Students who learn inductively, who absorb languages naturally, who have a good ear for Spanish, French, or Korean, often thrive in this environment. It is, in our experience, the method best suited to students whose gifts are literary rather than analytic, and whose patience for explicit paradigms is thinner.

Neither method, on its own, is sufficient. A student trained exclusively in grammar-translation can parse a sentence but sometimes cannot read one; a student trained exclusively in the nature method can read a sentence but sometimes cannot account for why it means what it means — which is precisely the ability the AP Latin exam and the international contests require. The honest answer is that both methods are instruments, and the question is not which instrument is right but which instrument, or combination of instruments, is right for a given student at a given stage.

Our instructor's own formation will indicate why we hold this view. He began Latin at the age of twelve in a Catholic seminary, where the language was woven into the daily liturgy and the common life of the school, and where he was taught, for a period, in private tutorials with a polyglot master who worked by the nature method. He went on to study Latin, Philosophy, and Literature at a university in California — where the dominant method was grammar-translation — and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and other honor societies. He has taught both methods, separately and in combination, for years. He does not pit one against the other, because he has lived the disadvantage of doing so.

Our programs, accordingly, offer the student several doors into the same house. One is weighted toward grammar-translation, another toward the nature method, and others toward combinations in varying proportions, with different paces and different starting points through the year. Each converges on the same destination: a student who reads Latin with genuine comprehension, who can defend any line of advanced prose or poetry from the text, and who can, when the moment arrives, sit for the AP Latin or the international contests with the confidence of someone who has been genuinely prepared.

The Students Who Find Us

There is a particular kind of student who finds Emerson Latin, and the finding is almost always an act of genuine initiative.

Most of our students do not take Latin in their schools because their schools do not offer it. This is more common than one might expect. Many attend international schools, foreign-language schools, and AP-curriculum institutions across Korea and other countries in East Asia — academically rigorous environments whose students frequently outperform their counterparts in the West on standardized measures, and where Latin has nonetheless never found a foothold. Others come from schools in the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and other parts of the world. Still others are enrolled in boarding schools along the American East Coast, joining us during the school year, and during our winter, spring, and summer intensives, for the Latin that their institutions offer too slowly or not at all.

What distinguishes these students is not their geography but their disposition. They arrived at Latin on their own — not because a curriculum required it, not because a parent insisted, but because something in the language caught them. Some were drawn by the intellectual seriousness it demands. Some by the competition — by the fact that Latin is one of the few academic disciplines in which a student of genuine formation can stand, in international contest, against the best students in the world and be measured against a fixed standard, without the subjectivity of a portfolio review or an interview. Some were drawn by what Latin would do for their college prospects; they understood, earlier than most, that gold medals in the leading Latin examinations and the international classical humanities contests carry a weight that résumé activities rarely match.

These are students who take Latin on their own initiative, alongside full school schedules, often across significant time differences. That is what makes the culture of Emerson Latin what it is. The classes are not occupied by students fulfilling a requirement. They are occupied by students who chose to be there.

What Latin Is For

Emerson — Ralph Waldo Emerson, after whom our program is named, and whose essay on Education remains perhaps the finest short statement of what a school should do — observed that it is better to teach a child arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy, because the former require exactitude of performance: it is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and, as he put it, "that power of performance is worth more than the knowledge." The remark repays attention. What Emerson is saying is that certain subjects train the mind in a way that no general exhortation can. The student who has correctly declined a Latin noun one hundred times has acquired, without noticing, a habit of precision that will serve him in every discipline he subsequently enters. He has learned what it is to be right, and to know it — which is the precondition of every serious inquiry.

This is the primary value we claim for Latin. It is not a means to anything beyond itself. It is itself an encounter, patient and cumulative, with the minds that shaped the West, conducted in the language those minds actually used. The student who has read Virgil in Latin has not read about Virgil; he has read him. And he has done so in the same words, the same meters, the same rhetorical turns that Dante read, and Milton read, and the Founding Fathers of America read. That is not a small thing. It is, for those who sense it, the reason to do the work.

The extrinsic consequences follow. They cannot quite be helped. Students who study Latin score, on average, a hundred and fifty points higher on the verbal section of the SAT than students who study other foreign languages. Humanities students — those who study Latin, classical languages, literature, and philosophy — score higher on the MCAT than biology majors and are admitted to medical school at higher rates; the AAMC's own data show humanities applicants outperforming biology majors by nearly three points on average, with the gap holding across multiple testing cycles. Law, medicine, and every profession that requires the patient interpretation of difficult texts draws disproportionately on the habits of mind Latin cultivates. Admissions officers at the universities that still understand their own traditions recognize a Latin transcript as evidence of something that cannot easily be faked: years of discipline, exercised by choice, at an age when discipline is not yet automatic.

We mention these things because they are true, and because parents reasonably want to know them. We list them last because they are last in importance. The parent who chooses Latin for the SAT score will be disappointed, or will be pleasantly surprised, and in either case will have missed the point. The parent who chooses Latin because she wants her child to inhabit the company of the finest minds in the Western tradition, and to acquire, in the process, the precision of thought that belongs to that company, will not have missed it.

Our Commendations and Laurels pages will tell you what our students have done. This page has told you what we intend.