I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English.
Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.
In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.
I was blown away by how... retarded... my reading comprehension and skills really are, when I recently opened Charles Dickens' "Bleak House," reading just the first couple of pages in! Yet I am even more deeply troubled that I am above the median.
I haven’t gotten to Bleak House, yet, but find I have to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once a long time ago).
"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
To me that all sounds lovely and evocative, hmm. Maybe an inspiration for some of the vibe in the game Little Inferno?
I have a book that says it's intended as a science book focusing on biology for around elementary aged students, it's from the 1890s and the material is something I'd expect high schoolers to start learning not 4th graders!
I think these sorts of things are very commonly misleading. The Romanian school system I grew up in for example nominally had way more advanced subjects even in middle school, not to mention high school, than what is commonly taught in much of Europe and the USA. For example, we did a solid two-three months of basic group theory in the 10th grade (sophomore year?) - learning about monoids, groups, rings, fields, proving isomorphisms between various structures etc. These were even part of the Bacalaureat, our equivalent of the SAT. A foreign language (almost universally English) is part of the national curriculum in Romania starting from the first year of primary school. When I went through school, we also used to have a set of canonical literary works that we were expected to read and be able to provide literary criticism on during the national exams at the end of middle school without access to the text; for example, the exam you'd take at the end of 8th grade would ask students to write a ~700 word essay on the main character of a particular Romanian novel; or on the themes of a piece of poetry the exam named, but did not reproduce.
However, the number of students who actually ever understand any of this is typically only a small fraction. In particular for the Romanian language exams, despite the theoretically high level of literary knowledge that it tested for, the actual rate of functional illiteracy between students who passed this exam was >20-30%. A huge swath of students either cheated, or simply memorized entire essays by heart, without even understanding what they meant. Of course, some of us actually did learn all of this from an early age - but this was far less typical than looking at the curriculum, exams, and even exam results would have suggested.
This is true, this book was also written when the idea of high school education was extremely new (let alone public high school education). With what you're saying it was likely a book for advance students and even though it uses terms I associated with younger people they likely meant teenagers.