BILL VALLICELLA: Inheritance and Appropriation.

The high school I attended required each student to take two years of Latin. Years later the requirement was dropped. When a fundraiser contacted me for a donation, I said, “You eliminated Latin, why should I give you a donation?” He replied that the removal of Latin made room for Chinese.

What I should have said at that point was something like the following. “While the study of Asian languages and cultures and worldviews is wonderfully enriching, it must not come at the expense of the appropriation and transmission of our own culture which is Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman.”