> > You mean not everyone speaks enough latin to know the difference > > between "exempli gratia" and "id est"? What is modern education > > coming to. > > Well, here, in Russia, while English/German/French are more or less > popular in the schools, Latin is being learned by specialists only > (medicians, historians etc.) almost. And it's the way it is for about a > century, if not more.
I think historians and excavators are just about the only people that should learn latin. It's also used most often by stupid people in an attempt to sound cleverer than they are and dumbfound others needlessly (lawyers and html editors for example). I can see an argument for cross country dialect (maybe medicine) but there's certainly enough english words for everything. Unless you need another language (I don't travel much unfortunately), your just wasting your time, which is why I'm really happy to know english as my first language. Atleast Latins taught via stories though unlike french but the stories are usually crap and you wouldn't call your kids Brutus and Quintus to sound clever, would you? The most valuable lesson I got possibly from education which probably hampered some of my results was to realise what you actually NEED to know and what is likely useful (minor obvious examples are learning the order and causes of events and not the dates in history and writing about a combo boiler because the computer paper was outdated and only awarded marks for a tank system, I knew this but I'm a stubborn bastard or if you prefer stupid rebel). When the education system realises this, we will probably have a more productive society. I really hope it doesn't come to business run schools too, that spells disaster to me. I know there's plenty of educational establishments that use OpenBSD, so I hope your listening. Unfortunately they are probably the better teachers.
