Hmm, while I agree there is a trade-off, I am mostly in favour of the shift away from the classics. It's not that we shouldn't learn from the Greeks, it's just

Hmm, while I agree there is a trade-off, I am mostly in favour of the shift away from the classics. It's not that we shouldn't learn from the Greeks, it's just that we can only afford one corner of a modern education for them. For one thing, languages are a big things that take a long time to learn. For people in most fields, the time spent learning ancient languages can be spent in better ways. Also, classical educations end up placing Plato and Aristotle on a pedestal, and those guys were wrong about most of the things they said (or rather, less right than their modern successors). Finally, an education can no longer be well-rounded if it only looks at the classical West. Western civilisation has been preeminent since about the 1600's, but if we go back to the axial age, then thinkers from all over Eurasia have to be reckoned with. It's bad enough to distill the Greeks to just Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, but now we have to add Zoroaster, Kongzi, Mengzi, the Buddha, the Upanshads and more just to get a fragmentary and hackneyed overview of classical thought.