Thread by @DellAnnaLuca

About 45% of Italian high-schoolers spend 3 hours a week for 5 years studying a dead language: Latin.

A thread on educational debt.

2/ First, let me clarify that I have nothing against Latin as an option.

But I don't think it should be mandatory for almost half of the population, for 3 hours a week.

It's not useless, but there are opportunity costs.
Couldn't we teach English instead? Or coding?

3/ Imagine if Latin weren't taught today, and someone said, "we should remove teaching coding and reduce the number of hours teaching English to instead teach a dead language for 3 hours a day to half of the population."

4/ (On the bright side, the hours of Latin are now 3 down to the 5 I had to study when I was in high school. It was the subject with the most hours.)

5/ So, it's worth examining why is Latin still occupying so many teaching hours for so much of the population

My hypothesis is that there are too many latin teachers, unionized, who would be left without a job

So we train generations of students with skills useless to get a job

6/ This is akin to educational debt. We have a misallocation of educational asset (teachers and their skills vs the job market) and instead of solving the problem (by retraining or switching teachers) we continue to create more and more misallocation, in the newer generations.

7/ Again, this is not a thread on Latin itself. It's about the opportunity cost of teaching it so much to so many people, and about why it happens (not a strategic choice but a bandaid-and-inertia mentality).

8/ BTW, on the topic of opportunity costs:

https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca/status/1112606442580660224?s=20

9/ Correction: in the first tweet, it's 37%, not 45%.

I wasn't aware that they ~recently introduced an option to swap Latin with coding, but only 8% of the population chooses it.

(thanks @randiisan for pointing it out)

10/ Many people replied, "but school is not about teaching work skills, it's also about teaching heritage and culture."

I fully agree. But there are many better ways to do that than Latin.

11/ Many replied: “Latin teaches you how to think”

I still have to see a single job posting saying “candidates should preferably have studied Latin”

(Don’t read me wrong. It’s not “it’s just about jobs” but “if it were useful, more countries would teach it & jobs require it.)

12/ BTW, imagine thinking that Latin teaches you how to think but coding doesn't.

13/ The most common reply: "personally, I found Latin useful"

The question is not whether it helped.

It's whether it helped better than the alternative.

14/ Correction: due to recent changes going in the right direction, according to 2019 data (MIUR) only 33.5% of new high school students study Latin; not 45%. Still a lot.

15/ Many replied: you don’t know because you never studied Latin.

I studied it 5h a week for 5 years, plus homework time. What a waste, *compared to what I could have learned otherwise*

16/ Many replied: it was your choice.

No, not really. I elected to study at a “scientific high school with a focus on informatics”

Which I chose despite it mandating Latin.

Also, there was no high school in my city that didn’t mandate Latin.

So, not much of a choice.