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> “There are certainly reasons to believe that the current crisis of the humanities owes partly to the poor job they do of explaining and justifying themselves.
by rhythmvs 12y ago
> “There are certainly reasons to believe that the current crisis of the humanities owes partly to the poor job they do of explaining and justifying themselves.”
Especially when they accept that the argument must exclusively be about a discipline’s alleged usefulness to the economy. Last week the Belgian vice-president said Latin should be replaced as a high school subject with programming classes, because they are more useful. It’s been picked up, even by prominent intellectuals: http://woutersoudan.be/20150405/ http://woutersoudan.be/20150405/
- johnchristopher 12y agoInteresting blog. I missed that in the french newspaper's headlines (which were focused on the `religion` classes mandatory status).
- tormeh 12y agoLatin is pretty useless, though. Useless things better be more enjoyable than their useful competitors and there are living languages to learn.
- thret 12y agoA girl I met recently is encouraging me to learn Latin. She is fluent, even competes in Latin poetry competitions (this actually happened). I think... all I can think of is that scene in Life of Brian! Although I am sure there is some benefit to reading Virgil in the original Latin.
- cafard 12y agoI should say that it makes quite a few languages easier to learn: the Romance languages and even the Germanic languages.
- tormeh 12y agoYeah, but so does Italian.