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rustcleaner | on: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for trying to sound the word out. By extension the loss of basic Greek & Latin has had a terrible impact; at least teach just enough to learn that most English words are compounds of simpler Greek/Latin words strung together (like German's adjectiveadjectiveadjectivenoun construction), which is very useful when either encountering an unfamiliar word and for constructing potentially new words.

Literacy rates are tanking as a result; Mississippi went from 49th to 1st in literacy by ditching the new-fangled whole word contextual style and going hard into phonics. Get them hooked on phonics again, then teach them Greek & Latin! Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the *second* foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first. It was a huge disservice to my education that the 'dead' languages were not offered to me in [junior] high school. I can only conclude that the curriculum and test writers only want literate-enough workers who can't critically think but who can [barely] read and follow written instruction.

simiones | parent | next
I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially.

Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").

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dash2 | parent | next
I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English.

Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.

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freediddy | parent | next
The whole-word learning "revolution" was based on a lie and misunderstood science. It set back a generation of kids and made them feel dumb because of a stupid group of educators.
tdb7893 | parent | next
My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at).

My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.

acamerer | parent | next
Very interesting. I do know that duolingo makes a great effort into trying to simplify the learning process to reduce friction, but still structured learning is really great for learning the rules, while duolingo is better for unstructured practice with some learning, like the article mentioned about the kid and the app I believe short circuiting to the reward.
aomix | parent | next
I credit randomly deciding to take Latin in high school as a huge change in the trajectory of my life. It didn’t even happen all at once. Just a little different perspective on how words are formed. Oh they’re often combination of simple root words.

Right after I graduated the one Latin teacher they had retired and that was it.

burnt-resistor | parent | next
Education boards and school districts in America keep making the same exact mistakes over and over again: throwing away proven methods casually for experimental fads.

This exact failure in 1960 California replacing phonics with whole word recognition led to backlash, including one teacher, Barbara Baker, who in 1963 formed Challenger Schools to emphasize phonics, academics starting in kindergarten, curiosity, and beyond minimum standards achievement/excellence.

thinkingtoilet | parent
I believe this is something that is no longer done. On top of that, one of the early major proponents of it has admitted it was a failure, but I forget their name. The school my kids are at are not using this system. Obviously it's a data point of one, but I don't think most schools are doing this anymore.