“Because Latin is taught to be read, not spoken, as you learn it you gain an understanding of the mechanics and structure of language streets ahead of any you will gain from the study of a modern tongue. Any other language – not just Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, but German, Russian, and Arabic – becomes easier for a student with a grounding in Latin. A student can use Latin to grasp the bones and sinews of any language. Students learning it will quickly start to read the great classics of Latin literature. Virgil, Catullus, Pliny, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, Tacitus. This is tough, uncompromisingly difficult stuff – but also offers entry into an astonishing world, a lost world that paradoxically offers itself up vividly and excitingly through its literature. These great writers lie at the head of a western tradition in writing that enfolds Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. To be a good reader of English literature, the literature of the Romans offers an inestimable advantage. Latin doesn't help to turn out factory-made miniconsumers fit for a globalised 21st-century society. It helps create curious, intellectually rigorous students with a rich interior world, people who have the tools to see our world as it really is because they have encountered and imaginatively experienced another that is so like, and so very unlike, our own.”