>I studied Latin and Greek for seven years, taught them for four, and talked one of them, on and off, for two; I found some moments of pleasure in them, but many hours of unnatural syntactic pain; they rarely helped me to enjoy or understand the geniuses of the classical world... I never knew how rich the Greek genius was until I stopped reading Greek.>Philologists should be encouraged to learn and preserve Latin and Greek for the purposes of scholarship and history, but there is no more reason for making a dead language compulsory than for compelling the student to learn an obsolete trade. There is but one decent thing for most of us to do with a dead language, and that is to bury it.
>>25354104
>>25354108It's an interesting take from an established author, what's supposed to be the bait? Christ.
>>25354104Based Kazantzakis enjoyer.
>>25354104Will Durant married her when she was 15 and he was 28
>>25354104based honestly, tricking people into thinking they have to learn these dead languages is just another way to gatekeep knowledge from the masses.
>>25354205Agreed.
>>25354113I didn't notice that detail. Based AF.
>>25354104>To conceal their deficiencies teachers choose the dead languages, in which we have no longer any judges whose authority is beyond dispute. The familiar use of these tongues disappeared long ago, so they are content to imitate what they find in books, and they call that talking. If the master’s Greek and Latin is such poor stuff, what about the children? They have scarcely learnt their primer by heart, without understanding a word of it, when they are set to translate a French speech into Latin words; then when they are more advanced they piece together a few phrases of Cicero for prose or a few lines of Vergil for verse. Then they think they can speak Latin, and who will contradict them?>In any study whatsoever the symbols are of no value without the idea of the things symbolised. Yet the education of the child is confined to those symbols, while no one ever succeeds in making him understand the thing signified. You think you are teaching him what the world is like; he is only learning the map; he is taught the names of towns, countries, rivers, which have no existence for him except on the paper before him.
>>25354139Why does he looker younger than her?
>>25356408>he is taught the names of towns, countries, rivers, which have no existence for him except on the paper before him.This is 95% of my brain.
>>25356748Some people age more gracefully than others.
>>25356408This is always the struggle with education. The measurement because the goal, and people forget what the point of education actually is.
>>25354104>not input-maxingIt was over before it started for unc.
Anything outside the Germanic language family is unnecessary for serious education, and really just an idle curiosity.
