“What are you going to do with that?”

Fritz Klug

“What are you going to do with that?”

Is a question I am usually asked whenever someone hears that I study Latin and Greek. At first, I am humbled that there is an interest in the classics. I then begin to explain but they usually stop me – “So, like, you could get a job as a translator?”

Yes, I could, but not with the United Nations.

With universities becoming more like upscale vocational schools than centers of learning and enlightenment, one of the cornerstones of education has crumbled: the classical education. What was once required for every student in high school and college, Latin and Greek Latin and Greek have all but disappeared. Now, “education” is all about making yourself more employable.

College is not a stepping-stone to a better paying job, it is the training to become a better human being. This is what the classics provide.

“Isn’t Latin a dead language?”

Yes – it is, if by dead you mean the basis for all romance languages. It’s dead if you mean that 28 percent of the words in the English language derive from Latin roots and 5.32 percent from Greek – dead, if you mean that they are the languages in which some of the greatest literature (The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Metamorphoses, Catullus’ poetry) and mythology was written in, that is still read today in translation.

Yes – they are dead, if by dead you mean the basis for all academia. If you were traveling to a foreign country (which, for many, college is) wouldn’t you want to learn at least some of the language?

I won’t use those reasons to defend a Latin degree. I’m not going to show you the data that studying Latin and Greek improves scores on the SAT and GRE exams, nor that it can help you get into Law or Medical school. I’m not going to provide you a list of distinguished classists, like Charles Geschke, software executive, founder of Adobe System, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Oscar Wilde, W.E.B. DuBois, or J.K. Rowling, to show you the versatility of professions that can be had with the degree.

I’m going to tell you why I study Latin and Greek. It’s simple: I love it.

“Why do you love it?”

Do you ask your mother why she loves you? I love Latin and Greek because it is always challenging. No matter how long you study, if you don’t keep it up, you will loose it. Just like an athlete, a classicist has to be disciplined,

I find pleasure in seeing different parts of sentence work together: noun, adjective, verb, direct object, adverb, and participle. I am comforted finding emotions that I thought no one else could feel in 2,000-year-old poem. I love the way Greek sounds when read aloud. I love the 2,000 years of tradition that comes with the languages. I love the dictionaries, grammars, and books that scholars dedicated their lives to compiling.

But still, since there is not a country that speaks Latin or Greek, since all of the important works of literature have been translated into English, there is no need to study it.

But since Classics are so “impractical,” they leave all the doors open. You’re not defined to one discipline with a Latin degree. You can be like T.I. and have “whatever you like.”

It’s not what you do with a Latin degree, but how you do it.

My friend and fellow classicist Casey Knott put it best: “The reward for studying Classics is the opening up of a dizzying scope of human achievement. An entire vista of history, literature, art, philosophy, theology, mathematics, and sciences opens up for the classicist in a very unique way.”

Basically, it’s a degree in everything.

And if that’s not the most bang for your buck, I’m not sure what is.

Fritz Klug, the Western Herald news editor, is a senior majoring in Latin.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=6498

Posted by heraldstaff on Jun 29 2009. Filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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