No longer the case

[porphyry]

Parsons, James C., English Versification for the Use of Students (Boston: Leach, Shewell, and Sandborn, 1891), 111:

"There seems no good reason why the young men and women in our schools should be more thoroughly and intimately acquainted with the phonetics, the grammar, the rhetoric, and the prosody of the classical languages, than with those of their vernacular. But, unfortunately, this is too often the case."

Comments

[himmapaan.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid not. Me included.

On the other hand, I'm not of western heritage nor was born in this part of the world.

But I wish such things were still taught when I came to school here too.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Your linguistic achievement is beyond question: native speakers don;t write as well as you do.

But the problem I'm highlighting (with the same prospect of success as Cassiodorus)is the fault really of government who decided to replace the Renaissance curriculum with a modern one entirely 'practical' in its purpose. One can;t deny that broadening education to include everyone naturally required changes. But it not require the change of choosing teachers from among the worst educated to choosing them from among the worst educated. So many of my classmates in graduate school offered the opinion that they would gladly have become high school teachers if the high schools were organized in such a way as to make it possible to teach, which they realized on the basis of their own experience, that they are not.

Modern schools are supposed to turn out graduates who are literate in science, math, and able to understand political affairs. The classical education seems to have done a much better job.

[himmapaan.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I understood you. And that's what I mean, too; I wish such things had remained in the curriculum and I had been taught them. The other deeply sad thing is that the classics seem to be somehow inextricably linked with class, like so many of the arts. The thought that they might have been taught at the school I went to (here in south London) would have been laughable or incomprehensible - or even contemptible there.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

The pun wasn't even intended, was it?

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

I couldn´t help thinking of this: http://restingpedant.livejournal.com/63378.html at reading that. Hope, that excellent gentleman, wouldn´t mind.

[med_cat]

My, my, how times have changed...

Now the young men and women are not acquainted with the phonetics, grammar, rhetoric, and prosody of either vernacular or the classical languages!