Notes fill our ears from the Spotify account. Colors smear across our home screen with the newest cinema. The phone pings with another message, another email, another headline. Yet these senses are not the primary way that the Lord of creation has chosen to communicate. It is not primarily in a song, a movie, or through the interaction with a dear friend that the Lord has chosen to make Himself known. Instead, the written Word of God is His primary means to communicate with us and to us regarding His character, His will, our great need for Him, and how He has met our greatest need through His Son. They are the words that we go back to time and time again. His words we have read before, suddenly seem new, or as if we do not recall ever reading them. It is this written Word that John discloses in John 1, the Word made flesh dwelling among us. The only begotten of the Father. The Light. The One and Only, King Jesus. It is these words from Him that convict while healing us. These are the words that are balm to the broken, that bring wisdom in worrisome times, that heal the helpless, that give worth to the poor in spirit, and bring salvation to the sinner. You and I.
Ralph Waldo Emerson shares, “Language is the archives of history.”
And so, at Providence, we throw our hearts into knowing “the Word”. We expect it of our teachers. Before they walk into the halls each morning, we implore our staff to put their hearts, minds, will, and ways under His Word. We begin the day as a staff community reading His Word together and praying His Word over your families and our students. It is His Word we look to as a guide for our school. As a guardian for each student who joins our community. In the mysterious and providential means to communicate with language, so we here at Providence and as a classical academy rightly focus on linguistics.
Roger Bacon states, “Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom.”
Our students journey through a thorough and comprehensive English grammar curriculum beginning in first grade. We begin with the parts of speech, punctuation and prose. Teaching the unknown by pairing it with the known. Building upon their English base, we proceed into second and third grade with Song School Latin granting them the base of the first 275 words connecting Latin to their English. The course couples tunes they know such as Row, Row, Row Your Boat with new Latin phrases to yet know. Since our students hold a solid grammatical foundation, this approach eases them into conversational terms and roots that are common in the English language. What does the Latin “et cetera” or “carpe diem” or “ad naseum” mean? Ask our Latin students! In the third and fourth year of the Latin language, we dive into derivatives such as “alien” or “fidelis” or “oratio”. How are these roots used in every day English and what words can be defined by identifying these roots in a word that is new to you? As they enter Logic, they also enter their three-year trek through Greek, culminating with translating an entire book of the New Testament. They pair known roots such as “theo” with fresh terms such as theocentric, or monotheistic, or pantheon.
We study language primarily at Providence so that we might bear His image in communicating. We do this by keeping His Word priority, keeping grammar as a foundational course and create a better base from Latin and Greek for our English. Lastly, we hope and pray that our students’ reach will far out stretch ours extending to the ends of the earth that all may know Him in their own heart language.
“The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough and is never considered a foreigner.” William Cameron Townsend, founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators
