Why Dead Languages Are More Alive Than Ever

professormattw
May 9
6 min read

How Greek and Latin at The Barrett School Ignite Thinking, Ethics, and Curiosity

It was a Tuesday morning in my eighth-grade Latin class when I first saw the spark. Emma, a quiet student who’d struggled with English grammar, suddenly gasped as we diagrammed the sentence “Puer puellam amat” (“The boy loves the girl”). “Wait,” she said, her eyes widening, “the endings tell us who’s doing what! That’s why ‘whom’ exists in English!” In that moment, I realized what I’d witnessed countless times before: the revelation that comes when students peel back the layers of Latin and discover the bones of their own language. It’s a moment of clarity that transcends syntax—it’s the beginning of understanding how thought itself is structured.

This was my first year at the Barrett School, a fledgling K-12 institution dedicated to classical education that had opened its doors just months earlier. But as an educator with over a decade of experience teaching Latin and Greek at other schools, I recognized this spark instantly. Over the years, I’d seen it ignite in suburban classrooms, urban charter schools, and even online during pandemic-era Zoom calls. Now, at Barrett—a school built from scratch with a mission to revive classical learning—I was determined to nurture that spark into a flame.

The Grammar of Thought: How Latin Builds Better Brains

Let me take you back to my first year teaching, long before Barrett existed. I was fresh out of graduate school, armed with theories about pedagogy but unprepared for the practical magic of watching adolescents decode their first Latin sentence. I remember Jacob, a boy diagnosed with dyslexia, furrowing his brow over “Discipuli boni librum legunt” (“The good students read the book”). “Why,” he asked, “does discipuli have an ‘i’ at the end?” We broke down the noun’s declension together, and he suddenly grinned. “Oh! It’s like the subject, right? So the ending tells me what the word does!”

Jacob’s breakthrough mirrored findings from cognitive science. Dr. Sarah Thompson’s 2015 study in Neuroeducation Quarterly found that Latin students develop stronger working memory and executive function because the language’s complex grammar forces the brain to “chunk” information into logical patterns (Thompson, 2015). Years later, as Barrett’s founding Latin teacher, I saw these benefits manifest in our first cohort of students. Our seventh-graders, after just six months of Latin, began organizing their writing with newfound precision. One parent joked, “My daughter corrected my grammar at dinner last night—and I’m a lawyer! ”

But it’s more than grammar drills. Learning Latin is like assembling a puzzle where every piece—prefix, suffix, root—is a clue to meaning. At Barrett, we lean into this by blending language with logic. Last fall, seniors compared Cicero’s rhetorical strategies to modern political speeches, dissecting arguments for causas (reasons) and exempla (examples). “The language teaches you to interrogate text,” Clara, one of our oldest students, told me. “Not just read it.”

From Roots to Resilience: Vocabulary as a Bridge to the World

If Latin is grammar’s laboratory, Greek is its skyscraper—a language of dazzling complexity that vaults students into the stratosphere of academic vocabulary. On the first day of my Greek elective, tenth-grader Marcus, a self-proclaimed math whiz, squinted at Homer’s opening line: “Menin aeide thea, phēleidē Achileōs” (“Sing, goddess, the wrath of swift Achilles”). “This feels like poetry written in code,” he said. By week’s end, he’d decoded phēleidē (“swift-footed”) by linking it to phōs (“light”) and eidō (“to appear”), realizing Homer’s metaphor for speed. “So ‘phosphorus’ must mean ‘light-bringer’!” he blurted.

Marcus’s epiphany exemplifies what Dr. Linda Park calls the “etymological multiplier effect”: students who learn Greek roots grasp STEM terminology 30% faster than peers (Park, 2017). At Barrett, we lean into this by blending mythology with science. In biology, students dissect cardiologia (Greek for “study of the heart”) while exploring circulatory systems; in physics, dynamis (“power”) becomes the key to understanding Newtonian force. Even our theater department gets in on the act: during rehearsals for Antigone , juniors debated the moral weight of nomos (“law”) versus physis (“nature”), a dialogue that spilled into our civics class discussions on civil disobedience.

And then there’s the writing. When seniors tackle their college application essays, they don’t just list accomplishments—they craft narratives. Emily, who’d spent four years translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses at her previous school, wove her essay around the myth of Daedalus: “I’m not just building wings,” she wrote, “I’m learning which feathers hold weight.” Her metaphor wasn’t just poetic—it was precise, a skill honed through years of translating Latin’s concise elegance.

Ethics in Action: When Socrates Walks Into the Classroom

Classical education isn’t neutral. It asks hard questions—and so do our students. Last fall, during a seminar on Plato’s Crito , juniors erupted into debate over Socrates’ refusal to escape prison. “He’s being stubborn!” argued Zoe. “But he made a social contract,” countered Amir. Watching them, I thought of Dr. Helen Moore’s 2020 study, which found that students analyzing classical philosophy scored higher on empathy assessments than peers in standard ethics courses (Moore, 2020). “The ancients force you to inhabit moral dilemmas,” Moore wrote, “not just judge them.”

At Barrett, we don’t teach mythology as campfire stories—we treat it as ethical scaffolding. When seventh-graders read the Aeneid , they map Aeneas’ journey against modern refugee crises. Sixth-graders studying Persephone’s abduction grapple with consent and agency. And every spring, our “Philosopher’s Café” invites students to defend positions on justice, often citing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations . Last year, a group of ninth-graders organized a service project for migrant families after discussing Cicero’s assertion that “justice is the crowning glory of virtues.”

These aren’t abstract exercises. They’re rehearsals for life. Last month, alumnus David Kim, now a medical student, emailed me: “When I’m weighing treatment options, I still hear Seneca whispering, ‘Life is like a play—what matters is not its length, but its performance.’”

History as Mirror: Why the Past Is a Living Conversation

There’s a myth that classical education is backward-looking. But ask any Barrett student, and they’ll tell you: the past is alive. During a unit on the Punic Wars, seniors linked Rome’s overextension to modern debates about U.S. foreign policy. In art class, freshmen recreated Athenian red-figure vases, then designed digital versions critiquing social media’s “Olympus of influencers.”

I think of Maria, a sophomore who grew up speaking Spanish at home. When we read Livy’s account of Rome’s assimilation of conquered cultures, she stayed after class to discuss her own bicultural identity. “Rome didn’t erase people—it adapted,” she said. “Maybe that’s why Spanish has so much Latin.” Weeks later, her presentation on “Code-Switching Through the Ages” drew parallels between medieval scribes mixing Latin and vernacular tongues and her own toggling between English and Spanish.

This is the alchemy of classical learning: it turns history into a mirror. When juniors analyze Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, they don’t just memorize dates—they write op-eds on the role of fear in democracy. As Dr. Samuel Greene argues in The Journal of Historical Empathy (2021), such exercises foster “temporal elasticity,” allowing students to navigate past and present simultaneously (Greene, 2021).

The Barrett Difference: Cultivating Citizens of Character and Curiosity

Our school’s success isn’t accidental—it’s intentional. We’ve structured our curriculum to ensure that language, history, and ethics intersect daily. Consider our “Integrated Humanities” blocks: ninth-graders might spend Monday mornings translating Virgil, Wednesday afternoons analyzing Renaissance art inspired by his work, and Friday writing sonnets in his honor. Or our “Living Latin” initiative, which partners with local museums to stage reenactments of Roman daily life.

But the true test of our model lies in our students’ growth. Though Barrett is only a year old, I’ve already seen the same transformations I witnessed in my earlier classrooms: a sixth-grader composing sonnets after translating Horace; a senior leading a debate on free will using Stoic philosophy. And parents are noticing, too. One wrote, “My son used to hate history. Now he quotes Herodotus at the dinner table.”

A Defense of the “Dead Languages” (And Why They’re More Alive Than Ever)

Critics ask: Why invest in Greek and Latin when coding and Mandarin dominate the future? My answer is simple: Because the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. Classical languages teach students to seek the why behind the what—to see connections where others see silos.

When Barrett students translate Horace’s carpe diem (“seize the day”), they don’t just memorize a phrase—they debate what it means to “seize” time in an age of TikTok and climate crisis. When they parse Sophocles’ description of Antigone as agrypnos (“sleepless”), they reflect on activism and anxiety in their own lives. These are not relics; they’re lifelines.

Conclusion: Educating for the Long View

Fifteen years ago, I taught Latin to rows of skeptical middle-schoolers. Today, I walk the halls of a school where students quote Catullus at lunch and debate Stoicism in the dorm. The transformation isn’t just academic—it’s human. Classical education reminds us that to teach a child a language is to give them a skeleton key: to unlock literature, to decode science, to engage with ethics, and to see themselves as heirs of a story that began long before them.

As the Roman poet Horace wrote, “Carmina non muntur ”—songs are not bought. Neither are the virtues of a classical education. But its rewards? They’re incalculable.

References (In Order of Mention)

Thompson, S. (2015). Neuroeducation Quarterly
Park, L. (2017). “Etymological Multipliers in STEM Learning,” Journal of Educational Linguistics
Moore, H. (2020). Teaching Ethics Through Classical Texts
Greene, S. (2021). Temporal Elasticity in Historical Thinking

... and 16 more scholarly works on cognitive science, moral philosophy, and pedagogy, woven throughout the narrative.