Re: Latin and other irrelevant topics

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

tom_swiftjr@my-deja.com writes:

> > In England, from the age of 7-13 I spent 10 class hours a week
> > learning Latin, and only 5 learning mathematics, when I
> > was 10, I added 5 hours a week of Greek :-) That's the way
> > things were done then.

> Perhaps that's merely a reflection of the state of advancement of
> mathematics when you were a lad?

There's hardly any relationship between the advancement of mathematics
and the math taught at school.  Many important things have been
discovered during the last few decades, but I doubt that (e.g.) the
classification of finite simple groups is relevant for school teaching
(even the trivial classification of finite simple abelian groups is
way beyound what it is taught at schools, at least here in Germany).