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Tangential but am reminded of Churchill's comments" "And when in after years my school-fellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage." and

"“However, by being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell—a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great—was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing—namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis."

Even better if you can do both!

by quietbritishjim12 hours ago|

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Great quote!

Your final sentence seems a bit odd in that context though: Churchill's point is that Latin and Greek actually isn't useful at all, so it would follow that it isn't better to do both (i.e. study the classics as well as English), especially as time to learn them would have a huge opportunity cost, e.g. you could use that time to study more English composition instead.

(If you think they're worth learning just for their own sake then that's another matter, but the quote seems to imply that Churchill wouldn't agree.)

by nephihaha1 hours ago|

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I think Churchill's main point is that they neglected teaching English well. However, if you read him and politicians of the era, you will find plenty of classical references. If we dig into classical history it is quite amazing how many of the same things we see. I was reading something about how certain cities in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) were spending more and more money on civic vanity projects and having to be bailed out by central government in Rome. Very similar to patterns today.

by nephihaha12 hours ago|

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Latin was a lot more common than Greek in schools in the UK. But even that tended to be private schools after the sixties and seventies. Greek was a subset of that.

I was lucky, I had two or three excellent English teachers. Very inspiring and helpful. I wish I could say the same about mathematics (most of my teachers were terrible and one didn't even teach us how to do the problems)... Or my French teacher. I think we spoke better French than he did at the end. Since I spent a lot of my childhood in rural Scotland I was effectively bilingual anyway.