Actual classics in middle school, to be realistic, is almost no classical
texts, lots of simplified texts designed to show off the subjunctive (or
the ablative absolute, or the aorist participes if you're studying Greek)
and some extremely filtered classical culture.
(I studied Latin in school, out of Latin for Canadian Schools, which
didn't track any author very closely. I studied Greek in first year
university out of a text designed for British schools, where the texts were
almost all potted and simplified Xenophon. And my daughter is studying
Latin out of the Cambridge Latin Course, which has more classical history
but is equally modern compositions.)
Unless we returned to Nineteenth-Century (well, British Public Schools
prior to about 1950) levels of classical studies, students get to read
real, difficult, texts by about Grade 12, on the threshold of university.
The advantage of the study in school itself is mainly as equipment for
later study, and to a certain degree the stretching of mental muscles from
studying a language more different from ours than French or Spanish are.
People tend to forget the sugar plantations and focus on cotton, and to
forget that it was the technical changes of the early industrial revolution
which made slavery an attractive economic model for cotton.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2018-05-10 02:53 am (UTC)Actual classics in middle school, to be realistic, is almost no classical texts, lots of simplified texts designed to show off the subjunctive (or the ablative absolute, or the aorist participes if you're studying Greek) and some extremely filtered classical culture.
(I studied Latin in school, out of Latin for Canadian Schools, which didn't track any author very closely. I studied Greek in first year university out of a text designed for British schools, where the texts were almost all potted and simplified Xenophon. And my daughter is studying Latin out of the Cambridge Latin Course, which has more classical history but is equally modern compositions.)
Unless we returned to Nineteenth-Century (well, British Public Schools prior to about 1950) levels of classical studies, students get to read real, difficult, texts by about Grade 12, on the threshold of university. The advantage of the study in school itself is mainly as equipment for later study, and to a certain degree the stretching of mental muscles from studying a language more different from ours than French or Spanish are.
I actually do think that students of, say, 16 or so are ready for real historical, literary, and critical training, but we don't trust them enough; or at least some of them. (And, of course, many who get to university aren't ready at all.) I certainly could have used more than I got. (And at 16 I was actually taking 16th-20th Century French literature in a Lycée, along with some rather dull history of the Third Republic; but that's another story. Ontario curricula would have to mutate massively before they would resemble French curricula.)
People tend to forget the sugar plantations and focus on cotton, and to forget that it was the technical changes of the early industrial revolution which made slavery an attractive economic model for cotton.