Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer? ‘The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom’ (New York: The Free Press, 1998), p. 166:

After the first three weeks of the beginning Greek class, 20 percent of the students are unfortunately conked, casualties of the masculine nouns of the first declension. Others are DOA thanks to the pronoun autos. The find that the autos monster can mean three altogether different things (“him/her/it/them,” “-self,” or “same”), depending on both its case and its position in a sentence. Students do withdraw from an introductory Greek class before they taste Plato or the Gospels, these bored, annoyed, and exhausted ninteen-year-olds, those very prospects who you once hoped would go on to Thucydides — and perhaps be one of the 600 each year in America who still major in Classics. They slide now across the hall to squeeze into the university’s over-enrolled Theory of Walking, Rope Climbing, and Star Trek and the Humanities, which will assuage and assure them that they are, all in all, pretty nice kids, classes that will offer the veneer of self-esteem but will guarantee that they will probably lose what little sense of real accomplishment they had carried within to begin with. You can nearly hear those doctors of therapy, those professors of recuperation at the lecture-hall door: “Come on in, you wounded Greeklings. It’s not your fault. They had no business subjecting you to all that rote; we do things a lot differently here. Relax, sit back, breathe deeply, and tell us how you feel.”

CS students still do. Or at least I did about 10 years ago.

At UWA, hexadecimal and assembler programming have been banished to the school of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

A few random thoughts on the underclass. We went through a period where many kids did not have to learn spelling and grammer so now we have a cohort of teachers who can’t spell or write grammatical sentences. So their students have a problem if the parents don’t know enough to help them.
Then there are Whitlam’s grandchildren, meaning the third generation welfare dependents.
And finally there is the gap identified by Jim Franklin in his book on Australian philosophy – the need for a secular substitute for the moral teaching that used to be done by the churches.
Those of us who have become secular humanists are not looking for a religious revival but there is a need to encourage people to take moral prinicples seriously. As Noel Pearson pointed out, you don’t appreciate the importance of the conventional mores until you see communities like the outback Aboriginal settlements where those principles are missing.

All the best, Ol’ Joe.

Think before posting, FEB. This isn’t LP. There are much higher standards required.

The points about the emergence of an underclass strike me as intuitively/observationally sound, but I would like to see more investigation to check whether or not I am a victim of my own selection/confirmation bias.

After all, I – or indeed any of us here – could wax lyrical about instances of this ‘new’ underclass around us today. But how many of us could make reliable comparisons with 1965 or 1980? I have to say, my experiential knowledge of that sociological dynamic from my own youth is very sloppy.

Alternatively, just shut the fuck up and stay out of other people’s conversations.