Faith Based Social Welfare

[The Duchess of Zeon]

As someone who does know Latin, it's practical use hovers around zero. No one speaks in it, so that's useless. The vaunted ease of earning other languages is.. Largely replaced by teaching one people are actually using. So nix that. The idea that it somehow helps in law or science is utterly ridiculous.

Latin was a fun language to learn, and I have enjoyed viewing those trying to modernize it, but Marina, you're letting your pet crusades obscure any sense of logic in this argument.

No I'm not, because you could easily transform your knowledge of latin into the knowledge of at least six and possibly more European languages which are also widely used in other parts of the world, Martin. That is incredibly useful--Latin is the foundation for those things. And how much have you applied yourself to the study of classification, medicine, or law, the subjects that I specifically mentioned it as being useful in?

[Mayabird]

Still, music is a skill that should not be taught except as an elective in addition to one's preexisting course burden. I am not against funding it in that sense, mind you, but I think that only people who are motivated to take it up in addition to their normal course load should apply themselves to it. There's no point in requiring it.

Sounds good to me. The worst kids in band were the ones who didn't want to be there but had to because of some stupid reason (usually parents). And I spent a lot of out-of-class time in band.

Will the classes have different levels for students of different intellectual abilities and caring? You could have the basic class for the stupid students and the ones who just don't give a damn (which teach just the basics) up to the most advanced classes where the fifteen year olds are learning Calculus and other classes at faster, more indepth rates. Trying to teach everybody in the exact same way means that education gets geared to the lowest common denominator and the smarter more driven students just get bored.

[Alex Moon]

As someone who does know Latin, it's practical use hovers around zero. No one speaks in it, so that's useless. The vaunted ease of earning other languages is.. Largely replaced by teaching one people are actually using. So nix that. The idea that it somehow helps in law or science is utterly ridiculous.

Latin was a fun language to learn, and I have enjoyed viewing those trying to modernize it, but Marina, you're letting your pet crusades obscure any sense of logic in this argument.

No I'm not, because you could easily transform your knowledge of latin into the knowledge of at least six and possibly more European languages which are also widely used in other parts of the world, Martin. That is incredibly useful--Latin is the foundation for those things. And how much have you applied yourself to the study of classification, medicine, or law, the subjects that I specifically mentioned it as being useful in?

The problem is that none of these fields will have any mass appeal. Most people will not need to know latin because most people aren't going to becom doctors or lawyers or spend any significant amount of time in Europe to use their language skills. They'll grow up to become construction workers or office workers, or framers or architects or any of a hundred other trades or professions which don't require latin in any significant way. Requireing them to learn it is a waste of time and money better spent on learning things that will help them in the future.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Trying to teach everybody in the exact same way means that education gets geared to the lowest common denominator and the smarter more driven students just get bored.

Actually, I think it would reasonable to let a large number of people flunk, perhaps the same number who today just get diplomas and then never go on after that. Because the quality of the education would be raised so greatly, the value of a diploma would be higher, and thus a diploma would actually mean something in getting hired (perhaps the same as having an associates degree would today), whereas people who flunk would be considered in the same way people with just diplomas are today.

[SirNitram]

As someone who does know Latin, it's practical use hovers around zero. No one speaks in it, so that's useless. The vaunted ease of earning other languages is.. Largely replaced by teaching one people are actually using. So nix that. The idea that it somehow helps in law or science is utterly ridiculous.

Latin was a fun language to learn, and I have enjoyed viewing those trying to modernize it, but Marina, you're letting your pet crusades obscure any sense of logic in this argument.

No I'm not, because you could easily transform your knowledge of latin into the knowledge of at least six and possibly more European languages which are also widely used in other parts of the world, Martin. That is incredibly useful--Latin is the foundation for those things. And how much have you applied yourself to the study of classification, medicine, or law, the subjects that I specifically mentioned it as being useful in?

I have to wonder about the logical disconnect occouring here..

Languages. Instead of simply cutting out the middleman and teaching a modern Romance language, you want us to use a massively out of date one. Sure, you could throw in the modernized words for modern concepts, but that's not gonna be much good. Why not simply.. Teach a modern language? If the differences are so slight that it's a mere act of will for those gifted with full function, why not simply strip out the middle man and go to a modern one? Of course, even that's not terribly logical; with your 'Everything must be economical' focus, it would be more sensible to focus on a language used by the big names economically. English is pretty widely used, so there's some leeway. Maybe German, as I understand they're still trying to ram that through as the EU's tongue. Or perhaps something from the Eastern languages?

As for the sciences.. Perhaps, dear Duchess, you can actually pull your weight in this and give a reason why knowing the translation of 'Homo Sapien Sapien', 'Habeus Corpus', 'Einsteinium', and 'Ununnilium' is so useful? The only real use is that I can tell you there isn't a science to classification. Two of those examples are the reason: Homo Sapien Sapien and Ununnilium are dog-Latin, the sort you do with an online dictionary.

No mystical insight into the organs is granted by knowing their original name, for much the same reason that we don't teach people that 'Atom' has the same meaning the Greeks gave to it: We've learned how wrong we were then. Similarly, the legal system might have a hard-on for spouting off Latin, but it does not grant Lumen ex nihilo to know how to say Lumen ex nihilo.

But, if you would like to try and present some real, quantifiable benefit for this, I am rapt with waiting.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The problem is that none of these fields will have any mass appeal. Most people will not need to know latin because most people aren't going to becom doctors or lawyers or spend any significant amount of time in Europe to use their language skills. They'll grow up to become construction workers or office workers, or framers or architects or any of a hundred other trades or professions which don't require latin in any significant way. Requireing them to learn it is a waste of time and money better spent on learning things that will help them in the future.

Then it is no less useless than any modern European languages, and by being the founding of learning a half-dozen of them, including the ones used worldwide, remains arguably useful for anyone; not to mention it remains particularly useful in certain skills which, if they are not common skills, are sufficiently important skills to mandate its being studied.

[Darth Wong]

Would you care to present a scientist or doctor or lawyer who will testify that a knowledge of Latin is necessary for his craft? I would like to see that, because from where I sit, it looks like you're bullshitting.

[Mayabird]

Trying to teach everybody in the exact same way means that education gets geared to the lowest common denominator and the smarter more driven students just get bored.

Actually, I think it would reasonable to let a large number of people flunk, perhaps the same number who today just get diplomas and then never go on after that. Because the quality of the education would be raised so greatly, the value of a diploma would be higher, and thus a diploma would actually mean something in getting hired (perhaps the same as having an associates degree would today), whereas people who flunk would be considered in the same way people with just diplomas are today.

That sounds even better. How long would schooling be mandatory? It would have to be long enough to ensure the population was literate and had basic knowledge, but at some point the people who don't want to be there are just dragging down everyone else and should just be allowed to drop out and be failures if they so desire that.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Languages. Instead of simply cutting out the middleman and teaching a modern Romance language, you want us to use a massively out of date one. Sure, you could throw in the modernized words for modern concepts, but that's not gonna be much good. Why not simply.. Teach a modern language? If the differences are so slight that it's a mere act of will for those gifted with full function, why not simply strip out the middle man and go to a modern one? Of course, even that's not terribly logical; with your 'Everything must be economical' focus, it would be more sensible to focus on a language used by the big names economically. English is pretty widely used, so there's some leeway. Maybe German, as I understand they're still trying to ram that through as the EU's tongue. Or perhaps something from the Eastern languages?

"Stripping out the middle man" is a frightful concept in language. You cannot learn Turkish well without a knowledge of Persian and Arabic; likewise you cannot learn Spanish or Portuguese or Italian well without a knowledge of Latin. Latin makes these languages much easier to learn and to understand how they operate and how they interconnect. It is the foundation to the learning of any language related to it because they are all descended from it and the connections and traces of the ancestry of worlds and grammatical concepts are absolutely vital.

But, if you would like to try and present some real, quantifiable benefit for this, I am rapt with waiting.

It's simply to provide sort of a "compass" if you will or guiding direction in those fields. Latin allows you to go from field to field, understanding enough of the gist of them all to keep one clear of extreme misconceptions. Essentially it is the language of the renaissance man, if you will, and in that sense it is important in preventing people from getting easily deluded in fields about which they have no specialized knowledge.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Would you care to present a scientist or doctor or lawyer who will testify that a knowledge of Latin is necessary for his craft? I would like to see that, because from where I sit, it looks like you're bullshitting.

It's not necessary. It's sufficiently useful that it should be mandatory--particularly in the case of people who never enter those fields but may be required at some point to sift between bullshit and truth. Like I just wrote, it's a language useful for a renaissance man, somehow who may have one specialty from college but should be able to avoid getting bullshitted in other fields to be a well-grounded individual who's capable of functioning in society. That alone may not be valuable enough to mandate its education, but when combined with the very real ties it has to many living languages, it does become useful, since it allows you to easily learn a large number of languages that would otherwise be quite difficult to learn in a vacuum, and individually.

[Gil Hamilton]

To ram-rod creative arts through when they have little objective, quantificable benefit to our society and when such classes benefit a comparatively very tiny portion of the populace, it is greatly wasteful and unfair. You're allocating a grossly disproportionate amount of time and funds to a small, select group with dubious gain in the end.

What do you mean no benefit to our society? Do you have any idea how much of our industry uses graphic designers and artists? Concept and design drawings don't make themselves (they're made my graphic designs, who have taken years of art school to get that good and usually have their start in highschool or earlier, because getting into many art schools requires a portfolio). I suppose you think that all commercials, television shows, and movies are made without first drawing it out shot by shot on story boards or that story boards are something that some person who took a bunch of "practical geometry" classes cooked up (guess what? they are made my artists and directors, who they themselves went to art school to learn how to make movies). Music is multi-billion dollar business and supports an entire industry, in and of itself. Think musicians picked it up in college or do you think they got there start sometime earlier?

It's not important to you but it is quite important to our society.

The knowledge of what those words mean can bring immediate connections to their context, however, which shall always remain useful; they are also important in biological classification (a field which, though it has a set system, requires a fair bit of rote without knowledge of the meaning of the words) as well as medicine proper. And of course I already noted that Latin is very useful in understanding half a dozen European languages, or more, and making them easier for people who speak English to learn.

You learn what those words mean anyway if your study law or biology, even if you don't learn Latin first. And besides, learning Latin is all well and good for study of language, but learning language that isn't dead is better. In the time it takes to teach Latin to children, you could teach them a more practical language.

Obviously math skills are important for concept drawings since they rely on scale; practical geometry would in fact have a heavy art component to begin with and I already advocated that. One of the easiest ways to teach practical geometry in a classroom would be drawing of scaled pictures. I have no particular problem with teaching supporting fundamentals that are suitable for education to individuals at the elementary level, "art appreciation", IE, the teaching of the fundamentals of appropriate art, at higher levels; and the teaching of applied mathematics which is very useful in music and art also at those levels, but also has other very relevant uses, for instance, in drafting and engineering. Music should be an elective in addition to required courses and taken at the additional time of the student above and beyond normal classes.

First of all, I've taken geometry classes that relied on a heavy drawing component. I have first hand experience on it and I can tell you right now that it doesn't come close to making a person a talent artist when it comes to drawing. At best it teaches a person to use some of the tools (like a straight edge and a compass) and a few concepts, but it teaches a person next nothing about producing real perspective (the actual mathematics of perspective are complicated and involve hefty amounts of very scary trigonometry and calculus... when you are making a drawing, it won't help you all that much unless you are a big fan of Thomas Eakins), it teaches a person absolutely nothing about composition or form, it teaches a person nothing about light and shadow, and it teaches a person nothing about the tools of the trade. It doesn't teach you how to use the materials or the tools that go with them. In fact, it doesn't teach you much about art at all and certainly nothing about music!

Real art classes are completely different and involve hundreds of manhours of time invested to get good. You wouldn't understand because you never had to sweat through any of it or even aware of the work that goes into it. Geometry classes will not, as you've said "set them up as well for an art or music career as any actual classes in those subjects".

Secondly, you're now back tracking. Now you want music to be an elective and didn't want to pay teachers to teach it since it was a "waste of time". Now you want to start offering it? I guess you must have actually talked to Zaia, like I said, and she beat it into your skull that learning to be a musician is damn hard work and that you start young.

Most of it is inborn talent, to be blunt.

This is complete and utter bullshit. Artistic talent is not "inborn talent". You could have all the inborn talent in the world, but it won't put an image on a page without the hard skills to put it there. Developing those skills and building talent take blood, sweat, tears, and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of practice. Do you think that "inborn talent" makes a bunch of blobs of oil paint into a work of art? It's all training and that training starts early.

You claim to be a student of history, but you don't seem to have any in terms of art. The old masters, the Michaelangelos, the Monets, the Picassos, the Rembrandts, they didn't merely have "inborn talent". They all started very young at the knees of an instructor, who worked them long hours cultivating their talent into something worthwhile and beat into them (some times literally) the skills necessary to be called artists. I mentioned the American realist Thomas Eakin above. He studied under the french master (and famed teacher) Jean-Paul Gerome, who himself studied under Paul Delaroche, who had a master himself and his master had a master. They certainly didn't pick up a brush one day and started plopping paint on canvas until they got it right! They spent long years struggling for their art under the watchful eye of an instructor.

Nowadays, we don't tend to have masters and pupils like they did in the old days, but the point remains. If you want a talented artist, you don't just count on inborn talent to make them so, you need to provide them with the means and the classes and resources to develop that talent. That means art classes. And if you want to go to college for art, god help you, because most art programs on the colligate level require you to walk in the door with a portfolio for them to pour over before they accept you into their program. Where does that portfolio come from? Students don't just make them on their own, they do it very much with the guidance of an instructor. Yet you want to can art in middle and high school as a "waste of time", despite the fact that talented artists are something in demand in the industry. Products don't design themselves. Story boards for the media don't leap into existance one day. Industries don't ask math students to create industrial designs.

As I'm sure Zaia has told you if you bothered to talk to her, music is much the same way. "Inborn talent" doesn't even scratch the surface when it comes to being a musician. People don't just figure that stuff on their own without formal instruction.

Really, Marina, it sounds like you honestly have no idea what actually does into developing real artistic or musicial talent, and in your elitist snobbery you assume that it must be easy, simply because you have no experience in it. "Pfft, it's just art... how hard could it be?"

[The Duchess of Zeon]

[

That sounds even better. How long would schooling be mandatory? It would have to be long enough to ensure the population was literate and had basic knowledge, but at some point the people who don't want to be there are just dragging down everyone else and should just be allowed to drop out and be failures if they so desire that.

Passage of the first year of high school should be mandatory and attendance in the second year mandatory; if you flunk out in the second year you're free to go.

[SirNitram]

Languages. Instead of simply cutting out the middleman and teaching a modern Romance language, you want us to use a massively out of date one. Sure, you could throw in the modernized words for modern concepts, but that's not gonna be much good. Why not simply.. Teach a modern language? If the differences are so slight that it's a mere act of will for those gifted with full function, why not simply strip out the middle man and go to a modern one? Of course, even that's not terribly logical; with your 'Everything must be economical' focus, it would be more sensible to focus on a language used by the big names economically. English is pretty widely used, so there's some leeway. Maybe German, as I understand they're still trying to ram that through as the EU's tongue. Or perhaps something from the Eastern languages?

"Stripping out the middle man" is a frightful concept in language. You cannot learn Turkish well without a knowledge of Persian and Arabic; likewise you cannot learn Spanish or Portuguese or Italian well without a knowledge of Latin. Latin makes these languages much easier to learn and to understand how they operate and how they interconnect. It is the foundation to the learning of any language related to it because they are all descended from it and the connections and traces of the ancestry of worlds and grammatical concepts are absolutely vital.

Nonsense! By this logic I can't learn English without a grounding in German and Latin; I certainly did learn English without either of those.

Learning a language for real is total immersion. This building-blocks stuff is exactly the sort of coddling which made my Public-School Latin courses useless.

But, if you would like to try and present some real, quantifiable benefit for this, I am rapt with waiting.

It's simply to provide sort of a "compass" if you will or guiding direction in those fields. Latin allows you to go from field to field, understanding enough of the gist of them all to keep one clear of extreme misconceptions. Essentially it is the language of the renaissance man, if you will, and in that sense it is important in preventing people from getting easily deluded in fields about which they have no specialized knowledge.

The Renaissance man doesn't exist anymore. I know. I tried that route. One could cop out and claim it didn't work for me because I'm LD.. But given that I've never seen any other successful ones, I'll assume that's BS.

And again I see this dearth of what I asked for... Evidence to these claims that it becomes a mere act of will to move from one unrelated branch to another.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

You learn what those words mean anyway if your study law or biology, even if you don't learn Latin first. And besides, learning Latin is all well and good for study of language, but learning language that isn't dead is better. In the time it takes to teach Latin to children, you could teach them a more practical language.

Again, it makes the learning of more than half a dozen practical languages vastly more simple.

First of all, I've taken geometry classes that relied on a heavy drawing component. I have first hand experience on it and I can tell you right now that it doesn't come close to making a person a talent artist when it comes to drawing. At best it teaches a person to use some of the tools (like a straight edge and a compass) and a few concepts, but it teaches a person next nothing about producing real perspective (the actual mathematics of perspective are complicated and involve hefty amounts of very scary trigonometry and calculus... when you are making a drawing, it won't help you all that much unless you are a big fan of Thomas Eakins), it teaches a person absolutely nothing about composition or form, it teaches a person nothing about light and shadow, and it teaches a person nothing about the tools of the trade. It doesn't teach you how to use the materials or the tools that go with them. In fact, it doesn't teach you much about art at all and certainly nothing about music!

But music is interrelated to maths and it is possible--if the curriculum was properly planned--to make that interrelation very clear and practical. Furthermore, the mathematics of perspective should obviously be taught, as they are useful; and practical geometry is a key component but just leads to the more advanced concepts in trig and calculus which should also be taught to art students for them to become proper artists. Which is why calculus and trig would obvously be taught to high levels under this programme, so I'm hardly ignoring that.

Real art classes are completely different and involve hundreds of manhours of time invested to get good. You wouldn't understand because you never had to sweat through any of it or even aware of the work that goes into it. Geometry classes will not, as you've said "set them up as well for an art or music career as any actual classes in those subjects".

Secondly, you're now back tracking. Now you want music to be an elective and didn't want to pay teachers to teach it since it was a "waste of time". Now you want to start offering it? I guess you must have actually talked to Zaia, like I said, and she beat it into your skull that learning to be a musician is damn hard work and that you start young.

I am not backtracking, as my first post explicitly said that music should be available as an elective. At any rate, at your suggestion I agreed that the teaching of basic art concepts relevant to the late-elementary level is perfectly acceptable, so I don't understand what this is about anymore, frankly.

This is complete and utter bullshit. Artistic talent is not "inborn talent". You could have all the inborn talent in the world, but it won't put an image on a page without the hard skills to put it there. Developing those skills and building talent take blood, sweat, tears, and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of practice. Do you think that "inborn talent" makes a bunch of blobs of oil paint into a work of art? It's all training and that training starts early.

You claim to be a student of history, but you don't seem to have any in terms of art. The old masters, the Michaelangelos, the Monets, the Picassos, the Rembrandts, they didn't merely have "inborn talent". They all started very young at the knees of an instructor, who worked them long hours cultivating their talent into something worthwhile and beat into them (some times literally) the skills necessary to be called artists. I mentioned the American realist Thomas Eakin above. He studied under the french master (and famed teacher) Jean-Paul Gerome, who himself studied under Paul Delaroche, who had a master himself and his master had a master. They certainly didn't pick up a brush one day and started plopping paint on canvas until they got it right! They spent long years struggling for their art under the watchful eye of an instructor.

Nowadays, we don't tend to have masters and pupils like they did in the old days, but the point remains. If you want a talented artist, you don't just count on inborn talent to make them so, you need to provide them with the means and the classes and resources to develop that talent. That means art classes. And if you want to go to college for art, god help you, because most art programs on the colligate level require you to walk in the door with a portfolio for them to pour over before they accept you into their program. Where does that portfolio come from? Students don't just make them on their own, they do it very much with the guidance of an instructor. Yet you want to can art in middle and high school as a "waste of time", despite the fact that talented artists are something in demand in the industry. Products don't design themselves. Story boards for the media don't leap into existance one day. Industries don't ask math students to create industrial designs.

As I'm sure Zaia has told you if you bothered to talk to her, music is much the same way. "Inborn talent" doesn't even scratch the surface when it comes to being a musician. People don't just figure that stuff on their own without formal instruction.

Really, Marina, it sounds like you honestly have no idea what actually does into developing real artistic or musicial talent, and in your elitist snobbery you assume that it must be easy, simply because you have no experience in it. "Pfft, it's just art... how hard could it be?"

None of those people would have gotten where they were without talent, and there is no reason that the system you mention of their learning could not arise again, and in fact if the historical record is any proof, it would teach them better than any school could. Art is not a mass-produced product and the education that I'm trying to develop is, ultimately, one. Art, being largely subjective, must be taught on an individual level which is impossible in the school setting for any successful artists to be produced. Therefore except for the most obvious of objective fundamentals that exist in the subject, art is quite simply outside of the scope of a public education. People with talent will be driven to get the education they need in the subject; people who do not have that talent should not be forced into learning things irrelevant to their future.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Nonsense! By this logic I can't learn English without a grounding in German and Latin; I certainly did learn English without either of those.

Learning a language for real is total immersion. This building-blocks stuff is exactly the sort of coddling which made my Public-School Latin courses useless.

I'm saying it makes it easier to learn other languages, not that it's necessary to learning them. Vastly easier, in fact. If you already know the principles of latin than your immersion-teaching in other languages will result in your being more able to connect that immersion teaching into your existing knowledge of English and the foundation in latin with which that language has been built that you're being immersed into it. Thus it comes much more naturally to you.

The Renaissance man doesn't exist anymore. I know. I tried that route. One could cop out and claim it didn't work for me because I'm LD.. But given that I've never seen any other successful ones, I'll assume that's BS.

And again I see this dearth of what I asked for... Evidence to these claims that it becomes a mere act of will to move from one unrelated branch to another.

No, it doesn't. Garh, you seem to be misunderstanding my point. Again and fucking again. It's that Latin becomes a tool for having a basic understanding of a complex subject, and in doing so prevents some of the incredibly glaring errors that people fall into these days.

[SirNitram]

Nonsense! By this logic I can't learn English without a grounding in German and Latin; I certainly did learn English without either of those.

Learning a language for real is total immersion. This building-blocks stuff is exactly the sort of coddling which made my Public-School Latin courses useless.

I'm saying it makes it easier to learn other languages, not that it's necessary to learning them. Vastly easier, in fact. If you already know the principles of latin than your immersion-teaching in other languages will result in your being more able to connect that immersion teaching into your existing knowledge of English and the foundation in latin with which that language has been built that you're being immersed into it. Thus it comes much more naturally to you.

I again ask what the huge benefit in Romance languages is. The modern world has largely left them behind, unless one of them hammers through their language as the EU's standard. You, after all, are the one proposing we school entirely for the economical effect.

Of course, I would mandate immersion in another language, but I would at least offer variety. The biggies... Latin, Japanese, German, perhaps a few others.

The Renaissance man doesn't exist anymore. I know. I tried that route. One could cop out and claim it didn't work for me because I'm LD.. But given that I've never seen any other successful ones, I'll assume that's BS.

And again I see this dearth of what I asked for... Evidence to these claims that it becomes a mere act of will to move from one unrelated branch to another.

No, it doesn't. Garh, you seem to be misunderstanding my point. Again and fucking again. It's that Latin becomes a tool for having a basic understanding of a complex subject, and in doing so prevents some of the incredibly glaring errors that people fall into these days.

What I keep trying to get across to you, Marina, is that you haven't proven this assumption as anything but the hopes of a Latin student after the fact. Knowing that 'Ununnilium' would make a real Latin speaker stare at you doesn't give me a goddamn speck of insight into the nuclear physics behind putting the fucker together, for example.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Would you care to present a scientist or doctor or lawyer who will testify that a knowledge of Latin is necessary for his craft? I would like to see that, because from where I sit, it looks like you're bullshitting.

I said the same earlier. My father is a specialized physician, and has precisely zero real knowledge of Latin. And he's never indicated it to me as something particularly useful, despite knowing my career and intellectual headings are similar.

[Vympel]

So far I have had no real use for Latin as a young lawyer. If I find some obscure phrase I don't know, I google it. Simple.

That said- if I was Princeps of the world, I would make Latin the official world language and ban all others, simply because it sounds good. IMPERATOR! DICTATOR! PRAETOR! TESTIS EST IN VIA! CAECILIUS EST IN METELLA!

And so on and so forth.

(Disclaimer: any actual Latin sentence in the above is designed to amuse, and if it's actually proper Latin, my putting it together in that way is purely luck)

[SirNitram]

So far I have had no real use for Latin as a young lawyer. If I find some obscure phrase I don't know, I google it. Simple.

That said- if I was Princeps of the world, I would make Latin the official world language and ban all others, simply because it sounds good. IMPERATOR! DICTATOR! PRAETOR! TESTIS EST IN VIA! CAECILIUS EST IN METELLA!

And so on and so forth.

(Disclaimer: any actual Latin sentence in the above is designed to amuse, and if it's actually proper Latin, my putting it together in that way is purely luck)

Yes, but then Latin would be the language of the aristocratic, arrogant upper class, and not a dead language. Knowing it would immediately seperate the wheat from the chaff.

[Illuminatus Primus]

What do you mean no benefit to our society? Do you have any idea how much of our industry uses graphic designers and artists? Concept and design drawings don't make themselves (they're made my graphic designs, who have taken years of art school to get that good and usually have their start in highschool or earlier, because getting into many art schools requires a portfolio). I suppose you think that all commercials, television shows, and movies are made without first drawing it out shot by shot on story boards or that story boards are something that some person who took a bunch of "practical geometry" classes cooked up (guess what? they are made my artists and directors, who they themselves went to art school to learn how to make movies). Music is multi-billion dollar business and supports an entire industry, in and of itself. Think musicians picked it up in college or do you think they got there start sometime earlier?

Then they can go to private schools, local tudors, and private clubs. But its simply way too much money for comparatively few students.

Every possible talent, ability, and profession is not pre-groomed and subsidized in High School, and never will be because that's impractical. I'm sorry, but I know the comparisons between these programs, and say science and history and it is ridiculous. And no, that stuff is not worth having pretty commercials. Funny we have film directors, and High Schools do not broadly subsidize this either. You often have to do it the hard way on your own back, and that's life.

Like I said, private clubs and groups should be encouraged and possibly recieve some government subsidy, but I am not going to set aside the time, money, and space that is done now for less than 10% of the student body (and FAR LESS than that are going to pursue a career or actually be successful).

This is complete and utter bullshit. Artistic talent is not "inborn talent". You could have all the inborn talent in the world, but it won't put an image on a page without the hard skills to put it there. Developing those skills and building talent take blood, sweat, tears, and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of practice. Do you think that "inborn talent" makes a bunch of blobs of oil paint into a work of art? It's all training and that training starts early.

Blah blah blah we see the soapbox. Some people have innate talent to be snipers - that doesn't mean you can toss them a rifle and they can pick off people at 1000 yards. Her point is that there is an extreme minority of students who will be good and actually do anything with it and to set aside rather luxurious amounts of money and time and space (and other things will obviously be cast aside for this) in order to force-feed it down each elementry school kid's throat and see a return rate of about 5% at best.

You gave the perfect example in movie directors - they must be cultivated by their own passion, hard work, etc. Well that's part of life - I do not see why it is the state's job to give everyone the perfect shot at being an artist when the VAST MAJORITY will take ABSOLUTELY NO net gain out of it.

EVERYONE who takes the math classes is gaining and will have application.

EVERYONE who learns civics is gaining something and will have application.

It goes on and on. By the precise same logic the State is entitled to give budding athletes a forum to cultivate their skill and passion. Well its ridiculous and axiomatic to claim that. It simply takes WAY too much money for a very few kids, and likewise with the fine arts.

And if you want to go to college for art, god help you, because most art programs on the colligate level require you to walk in the door with a portfolio for them to pour over before they accept you into their program. Where does that portfolio come from? Students don't just make them on their own, they do it very much with the guidance of an instructor.

This is stupid, obviously the nature of art instruction will adjust to compensate without universal State sponsorship.

Yet you want to can art in middle and high school as a "waste of time", despite the fact that talented artists are something in demand in the industry. Products don't design themselves. Story boards for the media don't leap into existance one day. Industries don't ask math students to create industrial designs.

What percentage of kids is this, Gil? Its so ridiculous. Should we have universal shop, drafting, &c. classes so each and every specialized skill is warmed up to the minority of kids going to head there eventually? Its far too great an expense.

As I'm sure Zaia has told you if you bothered to talk to her, music is much the same way. "Inborn talent" doesn't even scratch the surface when it comes to being a musician. People don't just figure that stuff on their own without formal instruction.

Look, buy and like to listen to music. That's good and dandy. But that doesn't mean diddly shit next to the ability to make drinkable water, stable houses, electricity, and to be able to elect leaders who won't destroy your country. To be able to get SOME job.

Really, Marina, it sounds like you honestly have no idea what actually does into developing real artistic or musicial talent, and in your elitist snobbery you assume that it must be easy, simply because you have no experience in it. "Pfft, it's just art... how hard could it be?"

No, I think its elitist snobbery on the part of artists to think its the State's job to selectively cultivate them in a highly disproprotionate and ultimately totally subjective allocation of resources with a dubious and often unequal return compared to the other solid domain of instruction.

[Vympel]

IP, what's "civics"?

[Illuminatus Primus]

civ·ics
n. (used with a sing. verb)

The branch of political science that deals with civic affairs and the rights and duties of citizens.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

[Illuminatus Primus]

The term has fallen into disuse in secondary education, but its extremely important and arguably one of, if not the principle basis for a good history education.

[Darth Wong]

Would you care to present a scientist or doctor or lawyer who will testify that a knowledge of Latin is necessary for his craft? I would like to see that, because from where I sit, it looks like you're bullshitting.

It's not necessary. It's sufficiently useful that it should be mandatory--particularly in the case of people who never enter those fields but may be required at some point to sift between bullshit and truth.

Ironic that you would say that, since your statements on this matter seem to be bullshit. And distinguishing between "so incredibly useful that it should be mandatory" and "necessary" is nothing more than hair-splitting. Please show me a scientist or doctor or lawyer who will testify that latin is so incredibly useful in the practice of their craft that it should be mandatory.

Like I just wrote, it's a language useful for a renaissance man, somehow who may have one specialty from college but should be able to avoid getting bullshitted in other fields to be a well-grounded individual who's capable of functioning in society.

Wow, I had no idea that repetition would make an idea more valid. Does it ever occur to you that genuine critical thinking skills are what allow you to distinguish between bullshit and truth, not a knowledge of Latin? A person who understands the principles of logic but not Latin will have ten times the ability to distinguish between bullshit and truth that a person who understands Latin but not logic will have.

That alone may not be valuable enough to mandate its education, but when combined with the very real ties it has to many living languages, it does become useful, since it allows you to easily learn a large number of languages that would otherwise be quite difficult to learn in a vacuum, and individually.

In short, it would be useful as part of European language studies. Which takes us back to square one: it should not be mandatory for general curricula because it is nigh-useless for anyone except for the puerile purpose of trying to impress people at cocktail parties.

[Lusankya]

Why Latin? Learing Chinese gives a good grounding in learning the written systems of Japanese and Korean, not to mention it being spoken in many other South East Asian nations (eg. Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan if you're of a mind to include that, even though I'm not really) and Chinese has the added bonus of being a language that is in use today, and is spoken in a country with a large, growing economy that will one day easily dwarf that of any other nation. French would also be more useful to learn than Latin - it is spoken in more European countries than any other language, and is also considered to be the official language of the EU.

I also find issue with the lack of choice evident in the proposed model. Children should be allowed some kind of choice in their schooling, not least because it helps them to learn. I know plenty of people who performed poorly in their English courses, not because of stupidity on their part or because they lacked English literacy, but because they found it

boring

. These same students performed very well in subjects like history, which they found much more interesting and which they applied themselves to much better. I don't deny that science and mathematics should be taught, but I don't believe that advanced science and maths should be rammed down the throats of children who simply aren't interested. All that will do is distance them from their education and make them disillusioned with school and perform worse in other areas than they otherwise would.

Personally I believe that a greater range of vocational subjects should be offered, in conjunction with some aspects of conventional schooling (such as one subject in the Arts/Humanities area and one subject that is Quantative/Experimental) to give the children who simply aren't interested in conventional schooling more incentive to attend school.

Yes, but most people who do good pursue those skills naturally, and frankly, encouraging most people to go into the arts is just encouraging them to be broke menial labourers for most of their lives.

You know the world still needs manual labourers. Even the lowliest telephone sanitiser has his place in society.