Smackdown of a Meme

[stevenpiziks]

On FB, a meme is wandering about that complains how high schools don't teach Greek and Latin anymore, so now we teach remedial reading in college.
 

Utter nonsense.

During the time period the meme is complaining about, finishing sixth grade was considered decent, and finishing eighth grade was considered advanced. Finishing high school back then was equivalent to an associate's or bachelor's degree today. If you weren't academically-minded, or you disliked school, or your family needed you on the farm, you dropped out, and no one made you stay. They also taught Latin because in those days, Latin was considered a superior language to English and scholars therefore needed to be grounded in it. (The prejudice against English in the academic community was so bad that the first grammaries for English were actually written in Latin.)

Things have changed. Now we expect EVERYONE to finish a college-prep high school, whether they're academically-oriented or not. (Hence the need for remedial reading--back in the old days, the remedial kids would have dropped out; we don't let them do that now.) Latin is gone, replaced by a pesky 100 more years of literature and history than they had back in the old days, geography that includes information about 50 states instead of just 38, a crap-ton more math, entire fields of science that didn't exist a century ago, physical education, and a living language such as Spanish or German.
 

The "good old days" of education produced people who had never heard of algebra, geology, economics, atomic theory, basic biology, or literature that wasn't written by a dead white man. We can let Latin go.