This was considered appropriate reading for American sixth graders in the mid-19th century

Goes to show how much Veeky Forumss canon of "classics" is a modern construction.

The only one I recognize is the Raven which I read around the sixth grade. Additionally it would have been easier to read if it was in the modern vernacular which the Raven would have been at the time.

No, I'm saying education costs money. And if you expect public education to be as good as private education you're retarded.

Most of those are just poems and short essays, 4 pages or less. Modern 4th graders in decent schools probably deal with similar levels of material.

sorry but looks at her nose, forehead, eye structure with respect to size, lips for a white-skinned female, skin complexion, and facial structure
they are indeed quite beautiful in themselves, never mind when you compare them to others who usually either have an ugly nose or too big a forehead, and never mind their ugly unsymmetrical structures. those disgusting imbecile who i loathe in pictures but only thinking of sexing when i see them in person

WAIT A MINUTE
those are all FUCKING WHITE MALES

le epic may may xD :^)

>Helen Hunt Jackson

fuck you it's still funny

It was common for 15-16 year olds to be learning philosophy at high levels and greek and latin at good schools in the early 20th and 19th century and so on. You're gipped if you were born now and are hoping to be ahead of everyone else.

You can still do that now, but it's a choice now, unfortunately. I started reading philosophy when I was 13-14, and I had no one to ask advice. I did it on my own and didn't tell anyone. I wish it was taught in schools instead, because I'm pretty sure it'd have helped make me start with any motherfucker besides Kant. You have no idea how difficult it was to understand shit when their writings were so fucking awful. After that I started using the internet and I started watching lectures and shit, it was alright. Fuck the internet though. Disgusting.

More like: thanks television.

>Modern 4th graders in decent schools probably deal with similar levels of material.
Show me a modern school expecting 4th graders to read William Blackstone (who is above the reading level of many college students nowadays btw). It's mostly about learning what sounds do sheep make or whatever.

That shit doesn't have any practical utility. The point of the education system is to create employees with a minimum skill set for the job market.

>6th grade

What age?

The world is different now. Back then, your average organizational cog didn't need to be literate, just physically fit. These days, we need people who can do math. Soon we'll need engineers.

They're all still a bunch of fucking peasants.

It's always unfortunate to see how many people into literature aren't into math and vice versa. Both are beautiful.

I love math, but here's the thing, society doesn't need mathematicians, it needs calculators. Nobody gives a fuck if you know what a "simple group" is. Plug and play with those equations, motherfucker, nobody cares if you can derive them yourself.

Fair enough.

>tfw I actually was taught Latin when I was 15-16
I didn't learn shit. A completely useless subject, only lowered my average mark.

And? Those kids were as dumb as today's. Reading some difficult stories and poetry doesn't make you smarter, I doubt they understood half the shit from the list.

yet they were still stupid and not as smart as children now a days.

I assume you mean society AT LARGE doesn't need mathematicians, but needs calculators.

To say the world/society doesn't need mathematicians is foolish. Mathematicians, just like any other researchers, are incredibly useful for pushing our knowledge forward and inspiring innovation with their discoveries.

And this is why I can't get 90% of the references in Ezra Pound poems. You needed to know Latin and Greek to get INTO Harvard. Shitty 90s education

Only after we convince the liberals its OK

I'm surprised. It seems like the curriculum has actually come up since then.

haha finny punk lyrics

> Latin
> useless
What's it like being 15?

To a 15 year old angsty lazy teen yes, it's absolutely useless and boring. Please explain to such a person why they should know how to infect "Iupitter".
Even if I hadn't been a lazy shit it would've been useless. I've read a bit about modern Latin teaching methods. As it turns out, our methods were painfully archaic and wouldn't help me in actual reading of latin literature.
Fuck, we didn't even use classical and the long-short vowels. We only "learned" declension and conjugation tables and that sort of shit that you'd forget immediately after an exam. It would be great if I knew Latin but this wasn't a good way to achieve that.

Inflect "Iupitter"*

I read from Victorian grammar books, in the 'old way', and it's a great deal more effective than the 'modern' way.

Knowing how to *decline* 'Jupiter' is per se useless. Having the mental fortitude to go through hundreds of declensions and conjugations, having an education in 'grammar' - for which English is a terrible language - is essential.

It would do today's teenagers a lot of good to be forced to decline 100 Latin words a day, without electronic devices. Hard work, and the reward which comes with it, is lacking totally from modern education.

That effective old way wasn't that effective in my case.

>Knowing how to *decline* 'Jupiter' is per se useless. Having the mental fortitude to go through hundreds of declensions and conjugations, having an education in 'grammar' - for which English is a terrible language - is essential.
Yeah sure. Sorry but giving a lazy 15 year old a hundred seemingly pointless declensions isn't going to change his work habits. The hard-working students remained hard-working and learned (and then forgot) the declensions, the lazy remained lazy and learned (in the last moment) the declensions needed for a passing grade. Where's that usefulness here? What have we gotten from that studying? Barren work and a grade.

>It would do today's teenagers a lot of good to be forced to decline 100 Latin words a day, without electronic devices. Hard work, and the reward which comes with it, is lacking totally from modern education.
Personal experience: a language isn't learned by empty repetition and studying, it is learned with real usage. In class I learned the mechanical aspects of the english language, but in books I learned its sound. I could read Shakespeare as a teenager because I had read many books in english before that (consequently had some real knowledge) and sincere interest in his works. The school did not give those two things to me.

> a language isn't learned by empty repetition and studying, it is learned with real usage
When you want to remember thousands of words and meanings, repetition is the best. With any subject, science, literature, anything.

Besides, 'real usage' of Latin or Greek is impossible.

This is what I mean. You're obviously young, and simply can't grasp what it means to study something so 'useless' and academic. The reward is the knowledge itself, not whether it's 'pointless' or not. It's the process, the sitting-down-and-not-moving-until-you've-learnt-a-hundred-declensions, the rigour of it all.

anything controversial is taken out, anything too hard is taken out, anything ethical or religious beyond "be nice and tolerant" is taken out, it is assumed that 80% of kids will not read and will get their summaries and essays online, it is assumed that it is completely irrelevant how much 70% of students learn in English class, and it is assumed, correctly, that nobody gives a shit