Don't Leave It To the Schools

Schools don't teach some of the most important things.  Maybe there's not enough time in the school day, but to that I would say "make the school day longer."  Specifically, I'm talking about the Latin and Greek foundations of Western civilization.  Why don't we have the grand, humanity-altering ideas that we used to?  Well, we do, actually; it's just that the people who have them aren't in position to realize their enactments.
Roman youths were well-schooled not only in Latin, but also in Greek grammar and culture.  Hellenistic culture was the basis of much of what became Rome as we know it.  These Greek and Latin foundations were lost during the "Dark Ages" (hence, the Dark Ages) after barbarians burned every church and public building they could find, which is where almost all of these documents were housed, but a few surviving stores of manuscripts were gradually rediscovered and translated by Islamic scholars into their Arabic language.  During that period, the world saw a "flowering of Middle Eastern culture" - which was actually a rebirth of classical Greek and Roman knowledge and philosophy.  Once this spread from the intellectual and cultural centers of Islam to Europe, largely through the Muslim conquest of Spain, Europe quickly awoke from its dark period and the rest, as they say, is history.  The Dar al-Islam ("House of Islam," i.e. the Islamic world) subsequently fell back away from its classical flowering and into its own focus and reliance on the words of the Koran and its earliest commentaries known as the Hadith; with that culture too, it can also be said that the rest is history.
By the time of the British Empire and the New World, all well-heeled young boys were infused with sound classical educations.  The political and social ideas of Greece and Rome were tossed and turned and debated and even experimented with, culminating in the largest-scale experiment of all, America.  And over 230 years later, the experiment is still working.  It's working more effectively than any government and society in the history of humanity, and no wonder:  the inventors of this system had centuries worth of foundation to develop from, without having to reinvent any wheels or go through trial and error.  There was, and is, nothing new under the sun.
How many children do you know that are being exposed to any sort of education in the classics?  5?  1?  0?  If they're in public elementary schools in America, the number is probably pretty close to 0.  Don't leave it to the schools; take it upon yourself.  Almost any sentence you use will have at least one word with a Greek or Latin root.  Take a second to point these out to your kids whenever you think of it.  Last night while washing dishes, my 7-year old 2nd grader asked my wife which definition was for "homonym" and which was for "homophone."  My wife wasn't 100% sure, so I went through the Latin root thing with my son:  "homo" means "same," "nym" means "name," "phone" means "sound," like you hear people on the phone.  So which definition goes with homonym, and which with homophone?  He immediately got it, then hit me with a followup out of the vast, well-lit recesses of his brain:  "dad, what does 'sapien' mean?"
Which led to a whole new, extremely short conversation, since I had no idea what "sapien" meant - but can you imagine where we might be if we all spent time on the classics?  It's the foundation of all of our political idealogy, all of our scientific and legal nomenclature, all of our daily spoken and written vocabulary, the very ability to express through words the highly nuanced thoughts and feelings that we are experiencing on a constant basis.  Not to mention the history lessons that we wouldn't have to continually learn by doing, rather than by reading about.  As Thomas F. Madden convincingly details in his book Empires of Trust, the Romans solved the vexing problem of religious terrorism in the Middle East almost 2,000 years ago; who among us, or among the world's political leaders, learned and knows what that solution was?  Thomas Madden does, I do, everyone who read his book does, as does everyone who's had a solid education in the classics.  Those are lessons worth learning about in text books, rather than figuring them out on the battlefield and in crowded cities.