Latin's Hidden Superpower

I'm currently putting together a "Latin Fast Track" course for homeschooling moms who have never taken a Latin class, and I had something of an epiphany...

For those of you who have never studied Latin, it's a bit like math (something I regarded as a secret betrayal when I first started studying it, seeing as I hate math and love history/languages). How dare Latin remind me of PEMDASing my way through a long algebra equation?

But there's no getting around it. Nearly every word changes depending on its part of speech, so you must solve for countless variables simultaneously, in every sentence..."Is this 'ae' ending genitive singular (possessive), dative singular (indirect object), or nominative plural (subject)?" The answer depends on the other words in the sentence, each of which have their own options...

That's where I had the epiphany: Latin's hidden superpower is that it provides the same logical scaffolding for liberal arts-minded brains as math does for the STEM-minded brains.

Latin creates a brain capable of understanding two (or more) things at once, predicting, remembering, solving problems all at the same time.

Why is this so crucial? Hear me out.

When Latin was de rigueur in any serious school, its graduates went on to rule the world. Eton College has produced twenty British Prime Ministers. Oxford and Cambridge created the best authors, generals, and captains of industry the world has ever seen. From the Greeks to the Romans to the English and the Americans, the fruits of a classical education are great. Its power has been used for good and evil, but there's no doubting its correlation with great power. (I've never studied Greek, but my limited forays indicate it's even more challenging than Latin).

It's no coincidence that when America decided Latin was too "old fashioned," the humanities stopped producing great minds.

When the humanities abandoned Latin, it abandoned its greatest tool to shape brilliant thinkers.

What happened as a result? The humanities slowly went from a party of professors who wear tweed jackets and dash off books like The Abolition of Man between their teaching duties and correspondence with Churchill to a party of semi-employed waiters in sweatpants whose teachers were too busy specializing in "Feminista Dance Disruptions in Fandango Temporalities" to give their students anything but debt.

A humanities degree used to mean you possessed the best of both worlds: a logical brain and the intimate knowledge of human nature that allows you to predict behavior, something that comes from a thorough knowledge of history.

Now, humanities has ceded logic to STEM, and a nobody understands what's going on anymore because nobody knows history.

If we wish to have a great future, it's vital that we start taking the humanities seriously again, and that means studying Latin (and/or Greek, if you're an overachiever!).

Logic is great, and we should thank the STEM crowd for keeping it alive. It's thanks to them, largely, that our economy hasn't collapsed and we haven't fallen into another Dark Age.

But it's the humanities that chart the course of great civilizations. Done right, a humanities degree gives you the logical brain of a STEM degree and all the persuasive abilities of a Roman orator.

The Romans didn't always use this power for good, but their pioneering practices in sanitation alone saved millions of lives. They built cities that bring joy to nearly everyone who visits them. We didn't figure out until 2023 how Roman concrete was better than ours!

There's just something about Latin that bridges the gap between the left and right brain, creating super-thinkers with superpowers.

I trust you will use that power for good!

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