9. That except to the members of the learned professions, and men of leisure and curiosity, the learned languages, to the mass of mankind, are of no use whatever beyond the ability to understand authors, and quotations from them, in those languages.
10. That, therefore, for lads intended for trades or business, all the time bestowed on learning Latin, beyond the capacity to read and understand it, is literally thrown away.
Some of these assumptions may be questioned, and, perhaps, are questionable, without materially affecting the proposed plan. Be this, however, as it may, I shall fortify myself with such an array of authorities, as, if it do not convince the reader of the soundness of the doctrines here advocated, will shield me from the charge of empiricism for advancing them.
“How many years of life are spent in learning Latin? How much labor, pain and imprisonment, are endured by the boy? How much anxious drudgery by the master? How much disgust of literature is engendered? How many habits are formed of reluctance to regular employment? In short, how much misery has been produced, is being produced, and will continue to be produced, in teaching the Latin language? This appears to us to be a very important question, and will, we think, appear so to our readers, after a little consideration.
“We sometimes figure to ourselves an inhabitant of another world coming among us, and examining with an unprejudiced eye the value of our pursuits. If this idle speculation could be realized, who, we should be glad to know, would be Quixotic enough to undertake a defence of the usual course of instruction in Latin? Nobody, certainly. For, in the first place, not two boys out of three who follow it, ever become able to read even the easier classic authors with fluency. Of these, perhaps one half, from the painful associations which they have attached to Latin books, never open one after they leave school. If we add to the account, as Rousseau would, the numbers who die during the schoolboy age, we shall find the list of those who use the knowledge, gained with so much pain to master and scholar, dwindle into a very small one.”—Essay on Public Education, p. 12. London, 1822.
“I object to the practice of sending, almost indiscriminately, every male child, whose parents are above the laboring class of the people, to undergo the painful drudgery of committing to memory the rules of a Latin Grammar, and to sacrifice four of the years of his existence to a pursuit which is ultimately to be of no service to him.”—Russel's View of the Scotch System of Education, p. 85.
“Does it savor of our characteristic sagacity to send almost every boy of a certain age, to a grammar school, to learn the elements of Latin, and afterwards to enter him to business, with no other qualifications for it than those which he may have derived from a partial and ill-directed attention to writing and accounts?”—Idem, p. 79.
“Many children are whipped into Latin, and made to spend many of their precious hours uneasily on it, who, after they are once gone from school, are never to have more to do with it as long as they live. Can there be any thing more ridiculous, than that a father should waste his own money, and his son's time, in setting him to learn the Roman language, when at the same time he designs him for a trade, wherein he, having no use of Latin, fails not to forget that little which he brought from school, and which it is ten to one he abhors, from the ill usage it procured him? Could it be believed, unless we had every where amongst us examples of it, that a child should be forced to learn the rudiments of a language, which he is never to use in the course of life that he is designed for, and neglect all the while,” &c.—Locke on Education, p. 289.
“The themes are written in Latin, a language foreign to their country, and long since dead every where—a language which your son, 'tis a thousand to one, shall never have occasion to make a speech in, as long as he lives, after he comes to be a man—a language, wherein the manner of expressing one's self is so far different from ours, that to be perfect in that would very little improve the purity and facility of his English style.”—Idem, p. 308.
“A young Englishman goes to school at six or seven years old; and remains in a course of education till twenty-three or twenty-four years of age. In all this time his sole and exclusive occupation is learning Latin and Greek; he has scarcely a notion that there is any other kind of excellence, unless he goes to the University of Cambridge, and then classical studies occupy him about ten years, and divide him with mathematics for four or five more.”—Edinburgh Review, Vol. XV. p. 45.