Students at Golden View come to know language differently than most students at other neighborhood schools. Starting in seventh grade, students take successive years of Latin language until their sophomore year when they elect to either continue on in Latin, or branch out into other language electives. Language, of course, is a means of communication. Yet, our everyday conception of communication is hurried, rushed, and poorly-considered. Dov'è la stazione? ¿Cómo estás? Wo gehst du hin? These are all useful phrases for the most basic functions of our physical lives, however, communication also happens across time. The ideas, values, and lessons of hundreds of generations have been encapsulated in the writings of the past. It is upon this foundation that the Classics department considers language.
Students begin with classical language, namely Latin. There are many advantages with this approach. Latin is both beautiful and dense, offering a contrast to the rapidity and subordination present in our native English. These differences offer us a first glimpse at the flexibility of language, even its imperfections. Learning Latin also affords students the opportunity to come face-to-face with many of the seminal ideas and values of our own culture at their source. Latin, spoken by the Romans, is not only the receptacle of many of the world’s great movements, of both thought and action, but it is, in many instances, their genesis. When students come into contact with these ideas, most often germinating from Greece and Rome and subsequently carried on in European cultures, they see our own values and principles taking shape. They see human questions which are suspended in time and they have gained access to them through the means of the very languages Homer, Cicero, or Voltaire wrote and spoke. In this act we are both the beneficiaries and the stewards of worthy tradition.
