DC sent this in for Explorator, but they seem appropriate here as well (Thanks!). The Financial Times seems to be the latest arena for the debate on studying Latin. Beginning with a piece by Matthew Engel:

When I was about 14, I was on a (compulsory) school cross-country run when the grey skies suddenly cleared, a golden light shone in the wintry skies – illuminating the muddy fields – and an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared and spoke unto me.

“You hate this, don’t you?” the angel said. “Yes.” “Well, a few decades from now, cross-country running will be the height of fashion. Marathons even more so.” “Yeah, sure,” I replied.

The angel went on: “The very plimsolls that you wear will become the height of fashion. Some smartypants will rebrand them as ‘trainers’ or ‘sneakers’ and make squillions. It could be you, y’know.” “Huh,” I said.

“Hearken unto me,” he persisted. “In future, people will spurn perfectly good free water from the taps and pay a fortune just because it comes in nice bottles.” The predictions were coming in torrents now. “Verily, men will shave their chests and think it manly; tattoo their bodies and think it smart; wear silly goatee beards like your music teacher and think it cool”

Then came the clincher. “And in the year 2007 learning Latin will be distinctly chic and trendy . . . ” I had heard enough now. “Look, angel, put your head in a bag and boil it, will you.” This was and is the only phrase used by my Latin teacher, Mr Crosthwaite, that ever made any impression on me. So the angel vanished, never to re-appear.

But Latin has reappeared. The “surprise” bestseller in British bookshops this winter is Amo, Amas, Amat And All That (Short Books) by Harry Mount, a former Daily Telegraph leader-writer. This follows the success of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, the Lynne Truss punctuation primer, and is based on the same principle. The British public love the idea of old-fashioned scholastic rigour, provided you present it in a sufficiently jokey way.

Mount slips in David Beckham on page 9, Angelina Jolie on 10, and Cameron Diaz just after that. Like Truss, he has very shrewdly ridden a wave. Or in this case, a wavelet, or maybe a ripple.

Every few days now, there is some new story showing that classics are making a comeback in schools. Inner-city children in Chicago and the East End of London have joined in. The Potters, Harry and Beatrix, have been translated into Latin. In Finland, there is even a Latin radio station. According to Gene Edward Veith, co-author of the implausibly-titled Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America: “Classical education is breaking out all over. It’s hard to keep up with it.”

Really? I think what we may be seeing here is the equivalent of what’s known on the stock exchange as dead-cat bounce: dead-language bounce. The study of classics has collapsed to such an extent that even the tiniest flicker of life seems like a revival.

Less than half a century ago in Britain, 60,000 pupils sat Latin O-Level, then the standard 16+ exam. Now barely 10,000 take the modern, easier equivalent GCSE. Just one-third of those come from state schools. And even that number can only be maintained by using the Cambridge Latin Course, which steers clear of nasty medicinal concepts like the fifth declension and the gerundive. Critics like Mount regard that as dumbing-down. Amid the hype, The Times reported earlier this month that Latin is on the brink of entirely disappearing from the state sector in much of the country.

On matters of academic rigour, I am definitely with Mount. I had to learn the fifth declension (and forgot it well before the exam) so why shouldn’t this generation suffer? And whenever I hear of an 18-year-old en route to uni to take a degree in tattooing and sandwich-making, I mention my friend the Cambridge classicist who is now a professor of media studies.

The point is that it’s somewhat harder to do a degree in media studies and become a professor of classics. And, yes, I wish I could hop on the train to read Herodotus in the original. And I do sometimes wish I could remember the definition of the ablative absolute.

But the question we asked each other when we were 14 still stands. (I’d have asked the angel had he hung around.) What’s the point? The Anglophone world is now so incapable of learning modern foreign languages that the British can barely order a beer in their favourite Spanish holiday resorts, and American intelligence can’t find any recruiting speakers of Arabic or Farsi who might be of some use in the current crisis. The advantages of learning Latin – let alone Greek – seem tiny by comparison.

Was Britain that much better governed when all the senior civil servants could converse in Latin? Most classicists usually seemed to end up teaching classics, which is hardly much of an investment in itself. Do we need more of them when university chemistry and physics departments are closing through lack of demand? Do we really need more Telegraph leader-writers? Or professors of media studies, even Latin-speaking ones who can beat me at Scrabble?

Pace Mount, cui bono? Learning Latin was ghastly. Hinc illae lacrimae.

Folks might be interested in reading some of the responses to the piece here, here, and here ...