Comment by andjones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andjones | Hacker News Reader

This test shows what was valued - at least at Harvard - in the late 1800's. Greek and Latin were more important, as well as knowledge of geography of the known world and algebra and geometry.

Algebra and geometry, I feel, are still important today (see SAT). Greek and Latin are less important, although they are still in the background. The humanities have changed and we now learn about more modern authors / topics and the humanities classes in general have cooler names (i.e. Microcomputer Application in Kinesiology or Topics in African Society and Culture).

There's probably some bigger point I'm missing here like "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it" or something similar.

Teaching kids about how to conjugate Latin verbs or some other rote activity always seemed pointless to me. Perhaps I'm preaching to the choir, but learning about entrepreneurship or practicing selling things would have been much more useful to me than many of the things I learned in high school or undergrad.

  > Perhaps I'm preaching to the choir, but learning about
  > entrepreneurship or practicing selling things would have
  > been much more useful to me than many of the things I
  > learned in high school or undergrad.

Does that have anything to do with your current life goals, by any chance?

You shouldn't argue from your personal viewpoint here. Sure, in retrospect it would've been great if school had taught me statistics and neurobiology from year one. But that is not what general, state-sanctioned education is or should be about. I suspect that for 80% all kids, entrepreneurship classes would have been a costly waste of time.

Latin is and most likely already was in the XIXth century a tool to discriminate people, which is one of the role of education (even more so in the XIXth century maybe ?).

There are at least two ways to look at education from a purely economical POV: signal theory (I take someone from Harvard because he was able to go to Harvard) vs human capital theory (I take someone from Harvard because of the things he learned at Harvard).

Of course, there are still many more aspects to it: I take someone at Harvard because he met people at Harvard... and I am myself coming from Harvard, etc...

More simply, I am glad most of what I have learned was "useless" in some sense. What's useful or not changes in times, you cannot necessarily know what's useful to you when you're 15, and you could argue that one of the role of education is to teach you things you will never see otherwise (to expand your horizon).

Not likely, definitely. Veblen wrote about Latin being used for that purpose in 1898 in The Theory of the Leisure Class.

The point of Latin was that it is the root of many European languages, so by studying it early on in education, you would later more easily be able to pick up one of its descendents.

However it is much more efficient to take a course in etymology (word roots) focused on the subset of Greek and Latin used in word formation in the major European languages (Romance or not) than it is to learn a lot of Latin and Greek just for that side benefit. I by no means disparage learning languages--I majored in Chinese and studied two forms of Greek in university, among several other languages--but if the goal is learning etymology, today there are royal roads for that purpose that can be traveled by people who never practice reading Latin or Greek texts.

The general observation is that learning ANY language eases learning the third and the fourth language, because the earliest experience in learning a non-native language reminds the speaker that each language has arbitrary features that must be distinguished from those of the learner's native language(s). Within the ambit of that general principle, learning cognate languages (for example, German for an English speaker) is easier that learning non-cognate languages (for example, Malay for a Chinese speaker).

That's probably true if you're an adult, but how do you motivate kids to learn etmology? At least with Latin there is stuff you can read.

So, by spending years learning Latin, I save... months learning another (European) language. I see.

You seem confused. I am not advocating this, merely explaining it.

Here are the reasons why one would learn Latin.

1. Converse with the great ideas of the past directly (definitely still true.)

2. Enrich one's mind by learning a superior language (like learning Haskell to write better PHP...speak better English by learning Latin. Still true.)

3. Learn a language found everywhere (not so true anymore.)

4. Learn the language of law, medicine and theology (sort of still true.)

5. Learn a foundation to learn Romance languages more quickly, as has been said.

6. Learn it just because it's there and a Renaissance Man has to take a crack at everything. Will be true as long as the language exists!

Finally, I strongly object to the idea that the purpose of Latin is to be "elite." Back then, anyone who went to school would at least learn a little Latin. So, you can say the purpose of having school is to be elite but not the purpose of Latin, because Latin wasn't taught to a subset of children until the 20th century. Today, Latin is taught to anyone who wants to learn, regardless of whether they go to school. My wife is a Latin tutor and about half of her students are below the poverty line or minorities -- and several adults are also receiving instruction from her.

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