My friend's daughter is an outstanding student in high school, but she sighs and looks down at her desk when I ask her how her ancient Greek lessons are going.

She has seven hours a week of Greek. She says memorising passages takes time and that she often crawls through a sentence understanding the words, but getting tangled up in syntax and meaning.

So why lock young minds indoors with a difficult language nobody speaks this side of Hades? Precisely because you have to work so hard at it, says Tracy Lee Simmons, a journalism professor at Hillsdale College in the US and contributor to the weighty journal of American conservatism, the National Review.

"A rigorous subject is exercise to the mind as calisthenics are exercise to the body," he tells GreeceNow. Learning any language systematically is good for you, he adds.

But, clause for clause, "Greek and Latin are the best tools because of their alien, syntactical difficulties.

Of course, we can get some of the same advantages with Sanskrit, which is well worth studying, but that won't help us to read the Theban plays.

A classical education stretches and enhances, for some even transforms, the imagination. It reminds us that the world is much bigger than we are."

American Minds in Ruins

Simmons talks respectfully of what he calls the "taut suppleness" of Greek and "lapidary" quality of Latin, so it would be surprising if he minced words. He doesn't.

The author of Climbing Parnassus - A New Apologia for Greek and Latin (Intercollegiate Studies, April 2002, US $24.95) says the erosion of the classical education in the New World has left young American minds in ruins.

"The decline of classics," he says, "has made us more trivial, less weighty, in our thinking, and certainly less wise." With the fading of classics, he adds, has come a fading of learning by rote memorisation, which he calls "a prerequisite to real knowledge."

Simmons says the decline is in the figures: "In 1962, 700,000 American high-school students were taking Latin; by 1985, that number had dropped to 176,000. Consequently, classical studies in higher education have suffered. Out of more than a million BAs awarded in 1994, only six hundred went to classics majors. And these figures tell only a portion of the story. For with the passing of Greek and Latin we have lost part of the soul of our civilization."

All Greek secondary school students today take ancient Greek. Those with a humanities orientation take Latin, too. Michael Siamos, who teaches ancient Greek in an Athens high school, says Greek and Latin "are special because they were the first.

When you know where you come from, you know where you're headed. You see that there's something that connects you to other people. It's a spiritual element of education. It's not so practical, but we don't want to make our lives too practical."

Superior Classics Education

Europeans who study Greek and Latin, Simmons says, are not just getting a different education, but one that is superior to that of Americans. And the sooner kids start, he says, the better.

"In fact, I'm not sure schools need to teach much more than languages and math to students under the age of 13 or 14. Afterwards, you can expand - and expand quickly, to history, to literature, to science, because students will know how to think by then. They'll also be able to teach themselves much. Classics in this way encourages intellectual independence."

Instead of reading books, Simmons says, American youth have "frittered away their childhoods on public-school silliness like multiculturalism and time-wasting projects... Multiculturalism wishes to see all cultures placed on an equal plane, but that's not where they are. I'm of Irish ancestry, for instance.

"Should the history and experience of the Irish people become more important to me than that of the wider West? Some say yes. I say no. The point of a cultural education is to learn the best, first, then go on to the others."

But does a classics education make any impact? After all, Greek youngsters armed with a classics education watch the same kinds of TV shows as their American counterparts, and listen to the same kinds of music.

Siamos says the curriculum alone cannot give young people a sense of the beauty and meaning of the ancient texts they are grappling with: "Everyone - parents, friends, television - is working against us, is telling students, 'You don't need this stuff.'" There's much more interest, he adds, in giving people training in "technical stuff - computers and things like that."

Simmons says, "a full classical education requires not just content and method; it also requires a spirit." If kids are not raised to see the "dignity and uniqueness" of their cultural heritage, he explains, it's not "students' fault if they go on to subsist on nothing but rap music and TV games shows, completely unaware that there's a richer world out there. Education is a delicate thing."

My friend's daughter, who juggles ancient Greek, Latin, English and a host of other subjects leavened with lots of memorisation, doesn't seem delicate. She's getting through with the top marks she'll need to get into the Greek university, she says. But what about those difficult sentences in ancient Greek?

"It's nice when you figure them out," she smiles.