Designer babies are here.

[Ben Kenobi]

Greek and Latin required for the BA for the study of Classics and Classical Civilization.

Classics is a different story. I'm talking about English and History degrees. That is what I meant by they aren't usually offered as a part of either, despite the relative importance.

If you're talking about English Lit, though, it's not required, per se, but then again, given the focus of the literature being mostly after the 1700s...

Any halfway decent course will have English lit from well before 1700, of which we ought to be discussing Latin too. I really don't see how we can understand Milton without at least a cursory understanding of Classics.

Now that you've realized your original statement is untenable, you're narrowing your field. That's acceptable, I suppose.

It's the biggest gap and I wish I had been spending classes on Latin rather then the usual gobbledegook that I had to waste 4 years on.

No, not really, but you also seem to be supporting that type of education.

I'm not sure where I gave that indication, especially since I am supporting reading the originals and having proficiency in Latin and Greek. That would presuppose reading Ovid quite thoroughly.

[Q Classic]

A language is a testament to a form of life. If you don't understand that, then you don't have much to say.

Specify exactly what you mean by that.

As far as the rest of your argument, simply put, I'm not saying that there's no point to studying those languages, far from it. I'm not even suggesting there's no reason to study those Western Classics.

What I'm saying is that there's only so much you can teach with those when the message falls on unreceptive ears--and I honestly think the effort that would be expended on that are not commiserate with the gains. You can teach a man Ovid, you can have him read Dostoyevsky, and you can have him learn how to integrate by parts, but if he's not willing to learn it, apply it, or utilize it, it'll vanish from his mind and it will have gone to waste. You can make him memorize the Gettysburg Address, you can make him recite swaths of the Illiad, but if he doesn't try to understand what those words meant, what good did it do?

You can't teach a mind that isn't open. And the educational system doesn't take that into account--the only "solution" they've come up with is to teach to tests, which is going in exactly the wrong direction, teaching trivia and rote memorization at the cost of an actual education.

[Q Classic]

I'm not sure where I gave that indication, especially since I am supporting reading the originals and having proficiency in Latin and Greek. That would presuppose reading Ovid quite thoroughly.

And what I've been saying is that I honestly don't think forcing that kind of education on the masses would really change anything. You're exchanging one canon for another. Maybe they won't have to suffer through the painful and abysmal prose of A Separate Peace and Catcher in the Rye, but I can guarantee you most high school students will be feeling just as annoyed when being forced to read the Greek classics.

If they read it at all. Cliffs notes are still around.

[Kuciwalker]

The original topic is way more interesting than this.

[Q Classic]

Any halfway decent course will have English lit from well before 1700, of which we ought to be discussing Latin too. I really don't see how we can understand Milton without at least a cursory understanding of Classics.

Except there's a comparative paucity of English lit from before the 1700s.

And as far as "cursory understanding of Classics", knowing Attic Greek and Latin wouldn't be necessary now, would it?

[Q Classic]

The original topic is way more interesting than this.

Indeed, since the only reason it's going on is because Ben, true to form, completely misinterpreted what I was saying, and Agathon, presumably because he's mistaken me for Asher, piled on. (Unlike Asher, I have no problem with philosophy.)

Sad to say, I'm not Asher's DL, even if my stint as Mrs. Snuggles may have suggested otherwise.

[Agathon]

Specify exactly what you mean by that.

A language is like a box of tools we use. The extent of the toolkit depends on the things we do. Some cultures do not have the tools other cultures do, because they don't need them for the lives they live. Cultures where people do not engage in disinterested abstract conceptual thinking don't have any words for those things.

It just so happens that I study the origin of these tools, by looking at the struggles of the people who were developing that way of thinking to express themselves in a language that did not have the tools. They made the tools by adapting old language. We inherited their tools. As far as we know, nobody else had thought this way before them.

As far as the rest of your argument, simply put, I'm not saying that there's no point to studying those languages, far from it. I'm not even suggesting there's no reason to study those Western Classics.

I simply do not care. This is besides the point.

What I'm saying is that there's only so much you can teach with those when the message falls on unreceptive ears--and I honestly think the effort that would be expended on that are not commiserate with the gains.

Because you do not understand the gains. Throughout history the ruling classes have chosen to give their children this kind of education, because it is the kind of education appropriate for rulers. We're stupid because we try to run a political system where everyone has responsibility for electing government, yet we don't give people the right kind of education.

You can't teach a mind that isn't open. And the educational system doesn't take that into account--the only "solution" they've come up with is to teach to tests, which is going in exactly the wrong direction, teaching trivia and rote memorization at the cost of an actual education.

Education is compulsory indoctrination. You can teach people to do anything as long as you have sanctions available for when they don't do what they are told. That's how airheaded British aristocrats were educated (George Orwell has a funny essay about this). We don't have such sanctions any more, since education has been made more "parent and student centered" since the late 60s instead of being subject centered and punishments for failing to learn have been largely abolished.

Modern education is largely a waste of time. I guess we agree on that. I don't even want to send my children to school.

[Agathon]

The original topic is way more interesting than this.

Then go find another thread to post in you annoying little boy.

[Agathon]

Actually, I'm pretty sure it was their Agricultural and Industrial Revolution.

This is kind of silly. Rome subjugated Greece, but the Romans adopted Greek culture (as Caesar's last words so poignantly remind us). When the West smacked over the East, the same did not happen. I wonder why that was.

[Q Classic]

This is kind of silly. Rome subjugated Greece, but the Romans adopted Greek culture (as Caesar's last words so poignantly remind us). When the West smacked over the East, the same did not happen. I wonder why that was.

Notions of racial superiority come to mind.

[Agathon]

Notions of racial superiority come to mind.

And the Romans didn't think themselves better than the Greeks?

[Q Classic]

Regarding English's complexity.

The reason why I disagree with your assessment that it lacks any is sort of touched on by how you say ancient Greek and Latin are taught--clinically, in a precise way.

No living languages are taught like this for a very simple reason--unlike your two favorite tongues, living languages are still evolving. Colloquialisms, regionalisms, reapproriations of words, borrowed words, and even body language provide a richness that dead languages lack; this isn't to say that the dead languages lack complexity, or nuance, or anything of the sort, but it does suggest that they lack the same type of complexity.

English itself is an interesting study, as there are numerous cases where when a certain concept can't really be expressed, it borrows the foreign term: zeitgeist, or schadenfreude, for instance; it's reappropriated words like gay to mean different things on context; and modifications like the oft-maligned "Ebonics", txt, or 1337sp33k provide alternative layers for the language, if we choose to ignore things like Singlish.

And it's not just English that displays a complexity that isn't easily replicated in dead languages. French is losing its negating particle through spoken evolution; Japanese requires one pay attention to body language closely for context in many cases.

So I'm not slagging on Greek and Latin when I'm disagreeing with you on the relative complexity of the languages, I'm simply saying that there's a lot more to consider when thinking about the richness of living ones, too.

[Q Classic]

And the Romans didn't think themselves better than the Greeks?

I'm pretty sure the Romans didn't think that Greeks were little better than savages.

[Q Classic]

A language is like a box of tools we use. The extent of the toolkit depends on the things we do. Some cultures do not have the tools other cultures do, because they don't need them for the lives they live. Cultures where people do not engage in disinterested abstract conceptual thinking don't have any words for those things.

And when those cultures begin to engage in abstract conceptual thinking, they often create words to suit their purposes. English didn't quite have it way back then, so they borrowed Greek and Latin roots and stiched them together. Had they been closer to the Sinosphere, they may well have borrowed Chinese terms; had the Arabic Empire not fallen, they might have used Arabic roots instead.

But in any case, the way you're phrasing language is akin to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is that a language shapes and is shaped by thought; that level of linguistic determinism isn't quite accurate, since it seems to be a lot more wobbly than that.

Because you do not understand the gains. Throughout history the ruling classes have chosen to give their children this kind of education, because it is the kind of education appropriate for rulers. We're stupid because we try to run a political system where everyone has responsibility for electing government, yet we don't give people the right kind of education.

Education is compulsory indoctrination. You can teach people to do anything as long as you have sanctions available for when they don't do what they are told. That's how airheaded British aristocrats were educated (George Orwell has a funny essay about this). We don't have such sanctions any more, since education has been made more "parent and student centered" since the late 60s instead of being subject centered and punishments for failing to learn have been largely abolished.

So, in other words, you're in favor of one kind of compulsory indoctrination. Which is fine. I simply disagree with your notion of what the "correct" ideology is.

To be perfectly honest, I've never been a complete democrat in the sense of the word that everyone should have the rights and responsibilities of ruling. I've always been in favor of complete liberty, but those are two separate things.

As far as modern education being troubled, yes, we agree.

[Agathon]

Regarding English's complexity.

The reason why I disagree with your assessment that it lacks any is sort of touched on by how you say ancient Greek and Latin are taught--clinically, in a precise way.

Come back when you have tried to parse a long sentence from the Timaeus.

English itself is an interesting study, as there are numerous cases where when a certain concept can't really be expressed, it borrows the foreign term: zeitgeist, or schadenfreude, for instance;

And it borrows its entire technical and scientific vocabulary from Greek and Latin. The Greeks didn't borrow it from anyone. They invented it.