From Julilla1@aol.com Sat Dec 30 12:59:38 2000 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id MAA61854 for ; Sat, 30 Dec 2000 12:59:37 -0800 From: Julilla1@aol.com Received: from imo-r02.mx.aol.com (imo-r02.mx.aol.com [152.163.225.2]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id MAA08208 for ; Sat, 30 Dec 2000 12:59:37 -0800 Received: from Julilla1@aol.com by imo-r02.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v28.35.) id d.b4.f4cedfc (3984) for ; Sat, 30 Dec 2000 15:59:14 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2000 15:59:14 EST Subject: Re: What About Latin and the Working Class? To: classics@u.washington.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Mac - Post-GM sub 146 In a message dated 12/30/00 9:23:04 AM, ricks@swcp.com writes: << You have yet to make a link to them of those interests being a pathway to that privilege and that privilege as being of value. >> Exactly. It's all well and good for someone from Harvard or Yale to expound upon the values of Ancient Greek and it's relevance to today's world but I don't think that they turn around and look at the reality of the community college student. Latin and Greek and Classics *look* worse than useless to most people because, in general, when mommy and daddy are working for a combined income of Fifty thousand a year and they actually have time to take a well deserved break with their child they aren't lecturing on Homer. They want something solid for their kids with the surety that what they learn will help the child do better than they have. Hey, it's like the old days, the only people who have the luxury of Latin and Greek and Philosophy are those who aren't busting their asses day in and day out. Those subjects are for Kennedy's who don't have to work a day in their lives, or Poindexters who can't do anything more useful for society like fix a car or sell insurance. All those Classics people get paid to sit around and live in mouldy libraries because there are very few of them and they don't suck *too* much off the University system and it looks sophisticated to have a couple....otherwise they're pretty useless. Classics is where we send the ninny kids who are off in Cloud Cuckoo land and care about things that no one else gives a good goddamn about and don't care to know why they should know it. It's about as useful to the average person as Victorian etiquette about egg spoons or lacy doilies wrapped round piano legs. If you want to boost Latin, at least, link it to higher math scores so that it looks like it's worth something. Otherwise you're going to have parents and students who wonder what the hell a dead language is going to do for their yearly gross income. K O'Ceriann .