Not elementary but in high school Latin was widely taught. For instance see Boston Latin School-that was standard of most days.
It was a hyperbole.
I have two eight-grade US history textbooks and the new edition has something like half of the content that the old one had.
OK, but everyone in New York state (your state’s educational requirements may vary) has to take four years of foreign language classes. That can be Latin or it can be something more practical such as Spanish.
How is that any different?
In our high school it’s the same thing but they don’t offer Latin at all. And considering this is a decently large high school that is unacceptable.
Cite for those two books, please? I’d like to see if they were both designed to cover the same subjects, or if one of them might have been created to cover a narrower field of study.
Why? What subject would you drop to make room for it?
This is basically what I wanted to say. I think, without doing, you know, research or anything, that 50 or 100 years ago a 12th grade education would cover some subjects in much greater detail than a 12th grade education would today–but a significantly lower percentage of people would actually complete a 12th grade education, let alone go on to college. More people would drop out of high-school and get a good job that they could expect to hold all of their lives. Now days, nobody believes that dropping out of high school is a good career move.
Also, of course, someone graduating today from 12th grade will have MORE education in some subjects than someone who graduated from 12th grade in 1959. Computers, for instance.
Boston Latin School was and still is the school for the children of the elite. It is in no way anything like the standard. It is degrees of magnitude away fron what the standard was, and is.
The biggest change has been an increase in the denominator. If you dramatically increase the number of kids who go to high school or who complete college or whatever level you choose, the new cohort is likely to be less capable than the old.
I would guess that educational standards have dramatically improved over the years but that the average at any particular level (high school, college, whatever) has declined simply because the population at each level is larger.
Another important effect is that your experience as a smart person (as all dopers are) included interacting with other smart people. Later in life, you compare your experience within your elite group with a merely typical group. Add in the tendency to romaticize the past and you have three very good reasons why you might think that education has declined.
FWIW I did five years of Latin including one year of Tacitus. I am glad that I did, but don’t think anyone is missing out by not doing Latin.
I also did five years of biology, five years of physics and five years of chemistry (which would have been seven years of each had I not left school at 16). I weep that my high school age son has had a single year of biology and chemistry and no physics at all yet.
I’m honestly curious, how is that even possible?
nevermind, I read that completely wrong.
I’ve been continuously educating myself since my youth and I’m 47. Yet poster Curtis LeMay has a far better history education than I do, and he is supposedly only 13. So no, either he is not 13, or he is a 60ish conservative history fanatic.
I am unconvinced that learning Latin at the high school level has much inherent value at all. It is instrumentally valuable for mastering the SAT and is useful in learning other foreign languages. The precision and structure of the Latin language will be lost (and probably has been lost) on just about any high school student who learns it today.
I majored in classics at an elite university that was fed by private schools just like Boston Latin. I was somewhat concerned in my first year that just about all of the other students had several years of high school Latin, and many even had the opportunity to take it at the AP level. My public high school offered no classical languages.
My advisor just told me to give it a year. He told me, somewhat improbably, that at the end of my freshman year all classics students, whether or not they had years of experience in high school, will be at the same level. He was right. They could have spent those four years smoking crack instead of struggling over some retarded HS Latin textbook and it would not have mattered.
Once upon a time, working knowledge of Latin and Greek were required to dominate the world. Obviously those times have changed. Using knowledge of classical languages as a yardstick for education today seems artificial at best.
Er, you were raised during the Civil War?
I agree with most of your post, so this line surprised me. What’s all this about about the precision of Latin? It’s a language, like any other. Being a “dead” language, it is perhaps possible to imbue it with a greater degree of static formalization than otherwise, but I find it hard to believe there’s any intrinsic greater merit to the structure of the language along axes like “precision”, “logicality”, or whatever else than for any other language.
Whatever unique merits there are to studying Latin beyond simply the advantages of studying any foreign language, they aren’t that the ancient Romans somehow discovered the secret of perfect speech before the world barbarically turned to other tongues. The unique merits aren’t intrinsic to the grammar itself; they’re in the fact that this was, for ages, the language of prestige in which much great work was written. Latin is an important historical language for the same reasons that modern English will someday be an important historical language, by virtue of the scope of its cultural hegemony, but nothing more.
(I doubt you really disagree with anything I’ve said here, though. You may not even mean what I thought you may have been implying (though certainly others believe similar things))
I think you are mixing a few concepts. I definitely do not make some of the grandiose normative claims you perhaps think are implicit in what I said above. Latin is certainly not better than any other languages. I maintain with absolute conviction that there is no Latin text, whether it be scientific, philosophical, or whatever that Aelfric could not have translated into perfectly intelligible and magnificent 11th century Old English.
There is no greater merit to the structure of Latin (or Greek or Sanskrit, for example). But there is a lot more structure, especially in the verbal system. I don’t want to hijack this thread completely; it is enough just to assert that it is possible to make very precise and elegant distinctions in tense, voice, and mood in these languages easily and neatly. In languages like English, we rely on more awkward and ambiguous auxiliary structures to do the same thing. Sensitivity to these nuances is required for trained readers of classical languages. The increased precision of classical languages can help you to think more clearly about your own communication in modern languages. Plenty of people communicate beautifully without knowing these things, of course. But all things being equal, it really does help.
I this is somewhat simplistic. Ancient societies were highly multilingual: the choice to commit a text to Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit was almost never done by default. It reflected the conscious will of the author. It is not just a random accident of history that thousands (or millions, in the case of Sanskrit) of texts were composed in highly structured languages. The authors themselves reflect quite a lot on this. There are advantages to highly inflected and structured languages. This doesn’t make them better, per se, just advantageous for the creation of certain kinds of texts.
There are disadvantages, too. For starters, there are extremely high costs to entry. Unfortunately, I don’t think that most primary education in classical languages actually pays this cost.
There’s better education available now than ever before, for kids and parents who are motivated to pursue it. A classical education of Latin, Greek and the four bodily humours does not fill my heart with confidence.
Well, if Curtis believes this point, I hope he remembers that it’s the fault of conservatives in Texas. 
In short: no, not at all. It’s just different things.
Imagine we’re in the early 20th century, and some moderately prosperous farmers send their first son off to a boarding school back East. He excels, becoming fluent in the classics, history, etc, learning the genteel virtues, stands at the top of his class. After graduating high school, he comes back home for the summer. And everyone thinks he’s an idiot because he doesn’t know how to grow crops!
That’s what we’re seeing nowadays, except the genteel virtues are what the old timers are arguing for without realizing time has passed them by. To succeed in the modern economy, you don’t need to be able to recite prose from In Catilinam (with a Vatican pronunciation). The single most important skill to develop in children now is symbolic logic manipulation. And in that, we excel–tests that attempt to measure that (IQ and SAT, for instance) have shown a consistent increase in scores, given a representative pool of test takers. Critical thinking rules over rote memorization–and anyway the average high school graduate now can probably on average provide factual information faster and more accurately than the average graduate then, so long as you give everyone the tools available to do that (Google! Wiki! Perseus!)
Before, a good science fair project might’ve been reproducing the experiments of Linnaeus, or making a bottle rocket. Yeah, BFD. Compare that to what Intel Science Fair winners are producing.
And I question whether people actually have less exposure to foreign languages now than before. Even if you restrict it to Latin, I went to a very diverse, underprivileged, and underfunded high school earlier this decade and still took 4 years of it, including AP classes. I was taught by someone who had an MA in the field (remember, even if a class was theoretically “taught” there’s no data that I’ve seen that indicates whether teacher’s even knew what they were doing then or if they knew how to teach).
Oh, and Curtis: one of the best things about high schools nowadays is that it’s usually easy for a motivated student to find a sympathetic teacher and organize a self-study course in their room during the period they don’t teach. My senior year I taught myself quantum instead of taking a science class (I had already taken all the ones available, anyway–modern schools are flexible, which allowed this to happen!) Do this, seriously. Might not be possible freshman year, but afterward for sure. You can study Ancient Greek and Latin and Sanskrit and whatever the hell you want to your heart’s desire.
Old fogies should learn to use a computer before they get up on their pedestals. My little 12yo brother can google circles around my mother. He speaks better Spanish than my father ever did (and that’s saying something). He’s in pre-algebra this year- two years ahead of my parents’ generation.
I suspect that before he gets to high school, he’ll be able to use MS Office suite as well as I could by college graduation. As for sciences, he’ll have had at least 2 years of advanced (post-primary school) classes in geology, physics, chemistry, and biology.
From what I’m told, schools in the 50s and 60s didn’t teach you anything practical. They taught you knowledge that let you ‘fit in’ with the class of people that were doing the hiring. If you couldn’t cut it, you worked in the mill for the rest of your life. That’s nothing to envy. Today, kids learn the things that are useful in life, and for that, they get snubbed by those people that still think school’s purpose is to boost you up a social class.
And for those Luddites that find cell phones and the internet “distractions” that kids spend “too much time” on: Give me a question. Any topic. I’ll see if the 12yo can get you a comprehensive answer faster than the guy with the library and encyclopedias.
Many of them can’t even write coherent sentences in college without extensive remediation. I’ve seen college placement test essays littered with text/IM abbreviations (all writing is not equal, after all, but some don’t appear to know the difference).