I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English.

Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.

In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.

I have a book that says it's intended as a science book focusing on biology for around elementary aged students, it's from the 1890s and the material is something I'd expect high schoolers to start learning not 4th graders!

I think these sorts of things are very commonly misleading. The Romanian school system I grew up in for example nominally had way more advanced subjects even in middle school, not to mention high school, than what is commonly taught in much of Europe and the USA. For example, we did a solid two-three months of basic group theory in the 10th grade (sophomore year?) - learning about monoids, groups, rings, fields, proving isomorphisms between various structures etc. These were even part of the Bacalaureat, our equivalent of the SAT. A foreign language (almost universally English) is part of the national curriculum in Romania starting from the first year of primary school. When I went through school, we also used to have a set of canonical literary works that we were expected to read and be able to provide literary criticism on during the national exams at the end of middle school without access to the text; for example, the exam you'd take at the end of 8th grade would ask students to write a ~700 word essay on the main character of a particular Romanian novel; or on the themes of a piece of poetry the exam named, but did not reproduce.

However, the number of students who actually ever understand any of this is typically only a small fraction. In particular for the Romanian language exams, despite the theoretically high level of literary knowledge that it tested for, the actual rate of functional illiteracy between students who passed this exam was >20-30%. A huge swath of students either cheated, or simply memorized entire essays by heart, without even understanding what they meant. Of course, some of us actually did learn all of this from an early age - but this was far less typical than looking at the curriculum, exams, and even exam results would have suggested.

This is true, this book was also written when the idea of high school education was extremely new (let alone public high school education). With what you're saying it was likely a book for advance students and even though it uses terms I associated with younger people they likely meant teenagers.

I was blown away by how... retarded... my reading comprehension and skills really are, when I recently opened Charles Dickens' "Bleak House," reading just the first couple of pages in! Yet I am even more deeply troubled that I am above the median.

"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."

To me that all sounds lovely and evocative, hmm. Maybe an inspiration for some of the vibe in the game Little Inferno?

I haven’t gotten to Bleak House, yet, but find I have to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once a long time ago).

I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially.

Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").

It's not even really about learning Greek or Latin as a true spoken language. It's about known the roots of the linguistics for understanding why a word is even created in the first place.

English is a really messy language but there are many simple underlying roots that can tell you what the word means with context clues after hearing it for the first time.

Also learning the International Phonetic Alphabet is probably another huge boon for comprehension, the nicer books often include IPA spelling for crazy off the rip words

If we're discussing pedagogy, hearing a word and repeating it with a human judging your pronunciation is miles better than IPA.

This makes me think that "accent/dialect reviewer" sounds like a rich option for something to train neural networks to do. :)

We had, spread over the course of our 8th grade English class (Thanks Ms Wilson), about 500 greek and roman roots to memorize, and weekly quizzes. These were not graded curricula, they were for extra credit because it was the teacher's personal program. No grammar, no conjunctions or conjugations, no sentence construction, just the two biggest veins that PIE has contributed to English nouns and verbs. Rote memorization.

I found I already could guess about 2/3 of them from being a recreational reader, but it helped a good deal even so. With the combination of a few years of Spanish and random etymological crawls through Wikipedia, I'm firmly in the top few percentiles of English vocabulary competence.

That sounds great, and very different from what GP said ("make French/Spanish/etc the second foreign language they learn after Latin&Greek").

Edit: I will still say that Greek has little relevance to common English vocabulary, though it is very relevant to almost every scholarly domain. The same is true to some extent for Latin - as the vast majority of non-scholarly Latin words in English are actually borrowed from French, and have (Old) French spelling and pronunciation, not Latin ones.

In the US, it seems like malpractice to teach anything before Spanish IMO. 14% of the country are native Spanish speakers. It's hard to imagine a return on any other foreign-language instruction that would match improving communication between 45 million residents of the country and everyone else, to say nothing of improving communication with citizens of the other countries actually sharing a land mass with the US.

If we find a way to make 4-6 years of language instruction reliably lead to a reasonable level of language competency, maybe. But until then, the student's underlying interest in the language is much more important than any abstract sense of usefulness. I took Spanish in highschool, and despite being moderately ambitious about it, never got very good, and never got much use out of it, despite living in Florida and Texas. I suspect (although alternate history is hard, so I can't guarantee) that I would have gotten a lot more out of Japanese, simply due to alignment of interest.

Learning Spanish in school was the single biggest waste of time. 14% of the country are native Spanish speaker! Many professions require some spanish! Those were the arguments back then as well.

However... unless you account that the native speakers and heritage speakers will learn English, making your ability to say cerveza useless. If you aren't fluent and have professional Spanish qualities (like Medical Spanish), its useless. Learning Latin or Greek would have been more useful, at least I could struggle through Cicero in Latin, than saying 3 words in Spanish before the other guy switches to English.

If you extend that logic to the world, is it malpractice to teach anything before Mandarin or Hindi?

No, because native Mandarin speakers make up only 1% of American citizens.

In the US you are very likely, at some point in your life, to encounter native Spanish speakers with poor English competency. Outside of higher education, you are very unlikely to encounter native Mandarin speakers with poor English competency.

... I'm not sure what part of "If you extend that logic to the world" you didn't understand.

The logic is inherently local.

The typical student does not emigrate or even travel that much, so you don't prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the population of the Earth, you prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the regions where they are likely to spend their lives.

> Classical Latin [has] extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language

…I know almost nothing about this topic, but this doesn’t line up with what people who know Latin have told me. They’ve frequently cited the language’s simple grammar as something they like about it.

(Classical) Latin nouns have one of 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and each noun has 12 possible forms (6 cases * 2 numbers); pronouns follow similar rules; and the adjectives modifying a noun have to agree with it in case, gender, and number (so typically a single adjective has 36 possible forms). Verbs vary by voice (active/passive), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, participle, gerund, supine), tense (different moods have different numbers of tenses, with 6 for the indicative), number (singular or plural), and person (3 persons); overall, a single verb will have more than a hundred different forms.

Because verbs have so many specific forms, it is also pretty common in Latin, as in most modern Romance languages, to omit the subject of a sentence, as it can typically be inferred from context plus the specific verb form - so, you often have to recognize the verb form to be able to understand who the sentence is even talking about (e.g. a sentence might say "amo regem"; if you recognize the words but not the specific forms, this means "love king"; but this unambiguously means "I love the king").

Now, there is quite a bit of regularity here - there are 5 categories of regular verbs (plus some specific irregular verbs), and 5 categories of nouns (though there are multiple sub-categories, as there is some variation in noun forms even in the same category; plus of course some irregular nouns).

Overall no, I don't see any comparison where you could say that Latin is a simple language. All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features. For example, Spanish drops the case system entirely, drops the neuter gender, and reduces the number of moods for verbs.

> All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features.

Wikipedia informs me that Romanian is a Romance language and has retained some of it. Also, the Slavic languages have largely retained most or all of what you’re describing, although they are not classified as Romance languages.

I am a Romanian native, so I know quite a bit about it :D . Romanian has kept the major features, but it still dropped a lot. For example, instead of 6 noun cases, Romanian only has 3, of which only 2 are commonly used (the third, vocative - "hey, you, bird!" - is quite rarely needed; and even when it is, it's usually replaced with the nominative by most speakers - we commonly say "pisica rea!" instead of "pisico rea!" for "bad cat!"). There are also fewer verb tenses in Romanian than Classical Latin, and some are formed with auxiliary verbs instead of being truly separate verb forms. Also, the neuter gender, while technically existing in Romanian nouns, is simply masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, there is no unique third form for adjectives or articles.

Slavic languages also have a case system (I think it's possible that this is part of why Romanian kept the Latin case system, as there was quite a bit of Slavic influence in Romanian), but they didn't "retain" it from Latin, as they are not Romance languages at all - they simply share this linguistic feature; Latin and Old Slavonic are by no means the only languages with a case system.

O-S-T-MUS-TIS-NT!!

i did Latin in HS. it's not simple, and classical Latin is "static" compared to modern Latin-based languages, which have evolved.

Good for getting SAT scores, but 3 years of actual French or Spanish would have done far more for me.

I don't think they're talking about learning greek or latin before english, it sounds like they're talking about putting more time into learning etymology which is incredibly useful.

They said "Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the second foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first.".

Education boards and school districts in America keep making the same exact mistakes over and over again: throwing away proven methods casually for experimental fads.

This exact failure in 1960 California replacing phonics with whole word recognition led to backlash, including one teacher, Barbara Baker, who in 1963 formed Challenger Schools to emphasize phonics, academics starting in kindergarten, curiosity, and beyond minimum standards achievement/excellence.

Very interesting. I do know that duolingo makes a great effort into trying to simplify the learning process to reduce friction, but still structured learning is really great for learning the rules, while duolingo is better for unstructured practice with some learning, like the article mentioned about the kid and the app I believe short circuiting to the reward.

My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at).

My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.

The whole-word learning "revolution" was based on a lie and misunderstood science. It set back a generation of kids and made them feel dumb because of a stupid group of educators.

I credit randomly deciding to take Latin in high school as a huge change in the trajectory of my life. It didn’t even happen all at once. Just a little different perspective on how words are formed. Oh they’re often combination of simple root words.

Right after I graduated the one Latin teacher they had retired and that was it.

I believe this is something that is no longer done. On top of that, one of the early major proponents of it has admitted it was a failure, but I forget their name. The school my kids are at are not using this system. Obviously it's a data point of one, but I don't think most schools are doing this anymore.

As someone who took both a 4 year latin curriculum and a year of koine Greek in HS: unqualified no.

Really wish I were fluent in Spanish or Japanese or really anything spoken.

It's way more comprehensive than just phonics:

- Mandatory screening of students in grades K-3, three times a year, using approved assessment tools, to monitor how early reading skills are developing

- Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools— for phonics and other aspects of literacy

- Large-scale efforts to train teachers

- Retention policies to hold back students who aren’t reading successfully by the end of third grade

Lifted directly from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/is-mississippi-cooking-the-...

It's also worth saying a lot of the gains evaporate when you factor in learning loss from COVID and Mississippi suddenly screening/helping kids for dyslexia (etc). But, still there's something to learn, just not simply phonics.