4 ms·

China is probably unique in that you can allude to ancient literature in marketing materials and expect large portions of the educated population to get it. Kid

• barry-cotter 9y ago
  Every educated man would have been familiar with the Bible and classical literature in Europe and the Americas until the 1960s or so. The western world, Latin Christendom and its descendants, had a canon which could be assumed common to all and alluded to for a long, long time. Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published in 1687. Dante’s Divine Comedy was the first celebrated work of literature published in the vernacular, in 1320. Latin was the sole official language in Hungary until 1844. The West’s ignorance of history is really quite recent. Matriculating at a university without Latin or Greek would have been impossible until at least 1880, conservatively.
• Nomentatus 9y ago
  That is to say, kids learn exactly the same ancient poetry; there's a very uniform curriculum I take it. They certainly don't learn every ancient poem. Which I don't mean as a criticism; the reverse. In our culture much of the Bible, Shakespeare, and selected Latin and Greek mythology formed a common base for discourse for the same reason not that long ago - before movies and TV.