Principles and Purposes
At the Public Latin School of Boston you must take four years of Latin (three if you enter in the 9th grade). We strongly encourage you to take one or two more years beyond that, or even two years of ancient Greek, or to study Greek myths and the Latin Middle Ages in Europe. But Latin, Greek, and related courses haven't been required for college admission for over a hundred years now. They're hard subjects and won't necessarily boost your high school GPA. You're not likely to have a real conversation with someone in those languages. They have no direct application to most kinds of work or professions you might want to pursue, and they certainly won't make you rich. So why do we make you take so much Latin and encourage you to take Greek and other Classics?

Here's why. You're at the Latin School because you've shown special potential for academic and personal achievement. Now, education is the shaping of potential by the application of tradition. Tradition is the accumulated wisdom, experience, and knowledge of countless generations of human beings before you. Your life and the things you do are understandable and meaningful only within a system of human traditions. They give you ideas and ways of thinking that you're going to need to make the most of your potential. To be educated at the Latin School is a special opportunity for you, made possible by the people of Boston and supported by alumni. It's a gift to you--a really valuable one. We want to give you, with your potential, the very best traditions, those that have proved their value to many generations. The European classical tradition has two great things to offer you: grammar and mythology.

By 'grammar' we mean, yes, the mechanics of language such as parts of speech, rules of syntax, vocabulary and so on; but we also mean the use of these bits and pieces and rules to hear the voices and feel the feelings of people who lived and died millennia ago. The better you understand the languages of the ancient world, the better you'll be able to hear those voices, still living and still saying important things to you about yourself and the world you live in. We want you to have access to those voices in their rich, original forms, in Greek and in Latin. The systematic study of language and literature is called 'philology', and it offers you other advantages, especially greater powers of critical thinking, reading, and writing.

Greek mythology was the original source of Western philosophy, science, literature, music, and art; it continues to be an inexhaustible well of inspiration and genius. The reason why lies in the history of that tradition. Classical civilization was continually concerned with two thoughts: the proper place of human beings in nature; and the tension between extraordinary individuals and the community that makes them possible. Greek mythology, in its stories of creation, the gods, and heroes, is a kind of language, too, a way of talking about these two problems, a way that is not strictly factual, but nonetheless true and meaningful. For you, with all your potential, these are critical questions. The ancient Greeks and Romans struggled with and developed their own answers. We think it's vitally important for you to know what they were, and in their full, original forms.

Some might say the Greco-Roman classical tradition now offers nothing of importance. The Classics Department at the Latin School believes differently: that it matters more now than it ever did. People also say that ancient Greek and Latin are dead languages. That's true, in a strictly practical sense, for they are no longer actively spoken; but it ignores what is far more important. These are languages of some of the world's greatest dead, whose heirs we all are. Through the literature of those languages, made more alive by images and artifacts, you can directly hear and, partly, speak with heroes and kings, orators and emperors, poets and philosophers, soldiers and slaves. Conversing with them, you can transcend time and place, race and culture. As their words and deeds echo in your imagination, you can live some of their experience, add their lives to your own. You will know their intimate thoughts and feelings, share in their humanity in ways that original language uniquely allows. The better you understand those languages and the cultures of which they were a part, the more of that experience you can use as a guide in the conduct and quality of your life. Through the languages, literature, myth and art of ancient Greece and Rome, you will find examples of extraordinary thought, speech, and deed that will help you to understand yourself as a human, make sense of the present, and imagine a worthwhile future. And this, we believe, will be the fulfillment of your potential.

The Department of Classics at the Public Latin School is grateful to the city and people of Boston and the School's alumni for their long, continued, and generous support of this vital tradition. We promise to continue to earn it. We hope that you, our present students, will one day strongly urge your own children to study the Classics because they were richly meaningful to you when young, because they continue to help you make sense of your lives as adults, and because you remember your Latin and Greek teachers with admiration and gratitude as skillful, kind, inspiring people in whom you could see living human evidence of the worth of the classical tradition.