Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/41

 of our high school curricula, and they appeal very strongly, some of them, to boys, because they suggest an immediate use and application of knowledge.

I am not now meaning to imply that many of them are not of use; in fact very likely each is of some benefit and may be put to immediate use more readily, apparently at least, than a good many other subjects which are in the high school course. They are more easily learned, however; they require less brain power, and they are more quickly forgotten than are those subjects that require concentration of mind and logical reasoning.

"Of what possible use could Latin be to me?" George protested the other day when his father was advising him to include it in his high school course. "I'm not going to teach, I'm not going to be a lawyer, and nobody talks Latin these days."

There is a curious, though possibly an explainable, point of view with many young people now-a-days that only the teacher or the lawyer could ever find any use for so dead a language as Latin—the teacher because everybody expects him to have had the subject, and the lawyer because many legal terms are still expressed in Latin, and the lawyer is supposed to know how to translate them. I suppose the real facts are that neither of these men needs Latin in his business more than any other intelligent or educated person does.

I am no special advocate of foreign languages, and especially of dead languages, and have no special fluency