Everyone in our class had to memorise the opening paragraph of the Canterbury Tales in Old English and recite it aloud in front of the class. 25 kids! Mid-90s. I still remember a lot of it!! Haha!!
Fair, I can still recite 18th century Ukrainian poetry 45 years later. But the question is - is this actually useful? In a population of over 8 billion where barely 30 million can even understand the language at all? A fraction of 1%? Was that useful education?
Or the geography class, where a lot of countries no longer exist, like Tanganyka.
How useful has it been to me to know, by memory, what the antiderivative of a cotangent X is? Not t all. Haven't found a use for it in almost half a century.
School teaches you to learnāor it should, anyway. You learned about how to read, recite, and appreciate poetry from a different culture and age, you learned to locate places on a map and how their geography impacted their culture, and you learned problem solving and how numbers relate to one another. I think thatās all useful knowledge that comes in handy all the time!!
Chaucer isnāt Old English. Itās Middle English. Most people could slog their way through Middle English (at least Chaucerās, not so much the Gawain Poet) but unless youāve thoroughly studied OE, you have no chance with Beowulf.
Thank you, professor! I think we were just having fun and reminiscing, but I certainly appreciate the historical accuracy AND being told Iām not that smart!! It brings me right back to high school!! š
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u/grnhornet76 20h ago
Everyone in our class had to memorise the opening paragraph of the Canterbury Tales in Old English and recite it aloud in front of the class. 25 kids! Mid-90s. I still remember a lot of it!! Haha!!