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I never understood ‘classics’ as a subject. Feels like it should be refactored into dead languages and history curricula. Most access for modern literary scholarship should rest on translation into living languages maybe?
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Here I become a traitor to my class and defend Princeton’s decision to remove Latin and Greek from its required curriculum for classics majors: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ (Traitor to my Latin class, that is.) In @TheAtlantic
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The classics used to serve as a communications platform for Europe. Wildly different cultures shared same metaphors and stories: useful for travel, diplomacy, cultural production, science until the mid-19th c. The subject declined for good reason, no longer needed in that way
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Educators around 1900 sensed people jumping ship, and like anyone subject to network effects were upset, c.f. Gwern's essay on programming languages as platforms. This triggered a pedagogical reform, now Latin has some of the best materials of any language.
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But you can still make a case that the classics is *special* dead languages and history. There is still a weird seeing-the-matrix effect from learning it. A surprising amount of Western culture is descended from this stuff - or just plain unchanged
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