Use of Latin in secondary/collegiate education

Factual Questions
21

I took 4 years of Latin at a Roman Catholic High School around 1970. The nuns said that you had to have Latin if you wanted to go to college.

  1. They were wrong about Latin and 99% of colleges.

  2. I didn’t go to college until 6 years after high school and never needed Latin.

  3. I moved to New Mexico after high school. I sure wished that I had taken 4 years of Spanish!

22

I took two years of Latin at a private Catholic high school in the mid-to-late 80s. It really did make me much more aware of a lot of English word roots. The elderly Irish priest instructor who entertained us with bawdy Latin poems was just gravy.

23

This Australian article, from New South Wales, had ‘French German and Latin’ all being in the top 15 enrolment subjects in 1967, but there were no languages at all in the top 15 after the mid 1980s.

The graph is a bit confusing, and I haven’t managed to track down the data source on which it was based, but it shows the overall trends in subject preferences over the past 50 years.