Pragmatic Reasons to study Greek and Latin:

• Raises SAT scores

• Teaches English vocabulary. More than 70% of English (and 95% of upper vocabulary) have Latin or Greek origins

• Teaches discipline, precision and attention to detail

• Teaches students to think well and systematically. Every lesson in Latin is a lesson in Logic

• Makes the learning of all subsequent languages easier

Profound reasons to study Greek and Latin:

• The ancient poets, historians, and philosophers portray powerful examples of compassion, nobility, honor, and purity

• The classical literature available to us today is the very best.  Only those manuscripts deemed worthy to be laboriously hand copied over the centuries have been preserved to the modern day

• These classical works provide the context for the modern world

• Greek and Latin are the languages of the Christian Church

• Greek and Latin are the languages of classical literature and grant students access to the full beauty and power of Homer, Plato, Vergil, Cicero...

Why Study the Classics?

A classical education not only prepares students for the practical responsibilities of life, but also opens the door to a deeper understanding of humanity and faith. At the CLRC we share a vision for education as an act of love rooted deeply in the relationship between teacher and students and students with their peers.  We are convinced that education is a process of opening closed doors of the mind and heart.  Central to this process is to surround students with images of virtue, nobility, honor, purity, sacrifice, loyalty, and beauty.  As teachers we seek to do this through the literature, poetry, art, music, science, and theology that we study with our students.

... we must needs attain to the life to come through virtue, our attention is to be chiefly fastened on those many passages from the poets, from historians and especially from the philosophers in which virtue itself is praised (for) one who has been instructed in the pagan examples will no longer hold the Christian precepts impracticable.

-- St. Basil the Great in his "Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature"

We are little moved by pity, honor, nobility, purity, because we seldom or never see them. We are even little moved by beauty, because we hardly know what it is.  … (Great art and literature) continually whets a thirst, it continually reminds us of a hunger it cannot satisfy. It leads us up to the very highest reaches of human experience, and then leaves us still homesick, still longing for we know not what, and at that point the spirit is enabled to go on, to find its true home in God. A soul that is unformed, uncultivated, will neither feel the true depth and pain of its homesickness, nor know how to remedy it. In order to be thirsty enough, hungry enough to seek God diligently and uncompromisingly, we must form our souls carefully and continuously.