The desultory state of education

But by 1834...the English headmaster par excellence Thomas Arnold sounded alarms. "Expel Greek and Latin from your schools," he wrote, "and you confine the views of the existing generation to themselves and their immediate predecessors; you will cut off so many centuries of the world's experience, and...place us in the same state as if the human race had come into existence in the year 1500." (If we bear in mind the desultory state of education today, this alternative no longer shocks us: we should be grateful now, and many of us would settle, for a historical memory reaching back so far.)
~Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, pp.72-73