Article by Nadja Duss, Daily Cardinal
Classics students and professors told the Cardinal studying ancient languages and texts teaches lifelong skills for the future.
Every morning from Monday to Thursday, Latin 305 professor Vanessa Schmitz-Siebertz kicks off her class by writing four English words on the board and asking students to tell her their roots. On Oct. 27, those words were punish, orient, nutrition and abortion.
Hands shot up and as Schmitz-Siebertz went down the list, she didn’t have to wait long for a student to offer an answer.
“‘Nutrition comes from nutrire… and that means to nourish or rear,” one student said.
“Orient is from oriri… to arise, begin, originate,” another said.
The roughly 20 students were never distracted, eyeing the clock or nodding off. Instead they were engaged and passionate. Professor Schmitz-Siebertz told The Daily Cardinal she believes through studying ancient history and language, students gain invaluable analytical skills applicable and essential to everyday life — and the students agree.
“Studying the classics is not just passively retreating into the past,” Schmitz-Siebertz said. “Studying the classics serves [as] a mirror to help us navigate the challenges in this world nowadays… because history acts like a blueprint of human behavior and failures.”
Unlike modern languages, which are housed outside of the Classics department, conversational fluency is not the ultimate goal when studying Latin — it’s textual analysis, Schmitz-Siebertz said. Her curriculums feature famous classical works like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the works of Cicero — assigned so students learn the culture and society of Ancient Rome in addition to understanding the Latin language.
“Latin is like a puzzle focusing on memorizing declensions, conjugations and grammatical structures,” Schmitz-Siebertz said. “We learn how to decode, how to solve these analytical puzzles of words, of texts, of sentences. This helps us think logically… [and] in this age of AI, be able to decode what we are reading.”
Classics Department Chair Alex Dressler said learning Latin helps students critically evaluate texts without making assumptions.
“Because of the foreignness of the text… you really can’t take any of the meanings for any terms for granted,” Dressler told the Cardinal. “It really relativizes your understanding of culture, and it’s a really good way to learn to resist anachronism or the imposition of assumptions about your values onto other cultures.”
Studying Latin also gives students further insight into English, many of whose words are rooted in Latin itself or Latin-based languages.
“The history of words and their roots increases your understanding of the English language too,” Schmitz-Siebertz said.
To help students gain insight into the lives of the average citizens of Ancient Rome, Schmitz-Siebertz has her students analyze ancient Roman graffiti from Pompeii or Herculaneum — “the writing of the common people,” she said.
“This is not some fancy author who was lucky enough to get a very good education,” Schmitz-Siebertz said. “These were men [and] women who didn’t write classical Latin literature.”
Senior Noah Hanson found the exploration of ancient Roman graffiti particularly engaging, calling it an ancient form of social media.
“I think it’s really interesting how for years everyone’s been making… fun of their leaders and stuff through what was basically the Twitter of the ancient world, which was just knocking stuff on walls and etching things in,” Hanson said.
But in addition to learning from ancient history, learning a new language poses a worthwhile cognitive challenge, Schmitz-Siebertz said.
“Latin is usually the first time that students get in contact with a highly structured and inflected language with a complex grammar,” Schmitz-Siebertz said. “Students realize that they have to work hard to acquire that language,… [and] by doing this, the students strengthen their endurance and perseverance, their self-discipline and [their] time management.”
Dressler added that studying an ancient society helps students think critically about the modern world they face with an emotional distance from the events they study.
“You can work with difficult topics in much more intense and focused ways if it’s not about a society that anybody feels a particular sense of belonging in,” Dressler said.
Schmitz-Siebertz believes studying ancient peoples also develops essential critical thinking skills.
“We can train students to decode and deconstruct, for example, political propaganda, media manipulation, misinformation,” Schmitz-Siebertz said. “These are all things that we encounter nowadays too.”
Dressler added how college gives students the opportunity to study things they are passionate about even if they do not want to pursue it as a career, an opportunity he thinks more students should take advantage of.
“If you’re not going to [study] it in high school, are you gonna do it in college? If you’re not going to do it in college, are you ever going to study it more?” Dressler said.
To spread the word about both Latin and classics studies, the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies held a High School Visit Day Sept. 29. At the event, roughly 80 students from four high schools in Wisconsin explored the campus and learned about the Classics department.
“All the public schools in Madison have gotten rid of Latin recently,” Schmitz-Siebertz said. “I think that is really a shame and a big mistake to get rid of it due to financial reasons, because it prevents students from even having the chance to acquire really valuable skills and knowledge that they would benefit from their entire life.”
This trend is nationwide and is also apparent in secondary education, with college and university Latin enrollments dropping by 21.5% between 2016 and 2021.
Whether they started taking Latin in high school or college, many of Schmitz-Siebertz’s students feel strongly about its importance in European language and culture.
“Since Latin is a foundation for a lot of romance based things… you can also see the evolution of other languages, which is always fascinating,” sophomore Teraun Nordman-Riley told the Cardinal.
Both Hanson and Nordman-Riley said they appreciate their time with the classics department.
“I love the classics department here,” Hanson said. “It’s a very tight-knit community, and I think that all of the TAs that I’ve had… are some of the best of the best here at Madison. They have taught me the most and have been the most attentive to my needs.”
“I was able to go on a study abroad trip over the summer with the classics department to Italy… and that was just… a really beautiful time,” Nordman-Riley said. “Overall, the department’s been very passionate about [what] they do, which is the most vital part of teaching and learning.”
The Classics department is very small, hosting merely 12 official faculty members, but its size lends it a close-knit quality, making it distinctive in the university.
“The atmosphere is very familiar, and everybody knows everybody else,” Schmitz-Siebertz said. “Everybody is very much caring about what we’re doing, and we all put great focus on teaching well.”
For Schmitz-Siebertz, Latin is her passion and she will continue to encourage its study.
“I really found my passion when I was basically forced to learn Latin,” said Schmitz-Siebertz. “Now I see that it’s a great advantage, and that everybody would benefit from studying it. That is why I want to get the word out about the classics in general.”