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There was a time when anyone with even a church grade school education could recite at least a little classical poetry and discuss at least a little Shakespeare. The real question is whether the loss of this is a tragedy, or whether the modern equivalents (eg. knowing a few key lines from Kanye's 'Power', or being able to discuss the plot of Harry Potter) are no better or worse for the public. By the way, I consider this at least a somewhat open question.
And it can be fairly argued that men with the finest classical educations sent millions to die in the Somme, and that even those few moderns who still had a similar education (eg. Eton-and-Oxford classicist Boris Johnson) hardly appear superior to their more mundanely-educated peers, and certainly do not appear more moral or more capable than them, even though they can speak Latin and recite Greek poetry.
That's not to say there's no way to talk about education objectively. You can talk about preparing people for certain jobs or whatever, although I think with AI on the horizon that's a flawed thing. But it is to say that I think 'objectivity' is the wrong framework. It's about culture. What should the next generation know, not because it'll make them 'better', but because it will make them 'us', because it will preserve, in them, something people alive today want to conserve, or want to promote.
People with a classical education could also talk all about the Roman Republic and French Revolution. We can't teach everything, and I'd much prefer to double down on stuff that's real than stuff that's fiction.
In general I'd agree, there was way too much fiction -- especially bad contemporary literary fiction -- in my high school curriculum. But certain works of fiction are of such cultural importance that they keep getting referenced by historical figures, so it is very helpful to have read the original so you know they talk about. Perhaps part of the problem with Shakespeare is that schools spend too much time over-analyzing it (badly). And often, they don't even watch a good production of it. It should be possible to get through a play in about 10 hours, including both reading it, watching it, and reading a commentary on it. Spending 60 hours total out of 6,000 hours of total schooling on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo & Juliet, and two comedies seems like a good use of time to me. I'd throw in a few histories as well, integrated in with a history course on that subject.
I once wrote a little trivia quiz "Bible or Shakespeare," that was full of commonly-used English phrases, idioms, and metaphors that originate in either the King James Bible or a Shakespeare work, and seeing if one could identify which of the two they came from. And then there's the Classical allusions: "Achilles' heel," "Trojan horse," "Herculean task," "siren song," etc. So much of our language at least used to be built around what, again, at least used to be a set of common stories and references, such that it can be hard to understand without it — I once encountered someone here in the US, and "culturally Catholic" at that, entirely unfamiliar with "30 pieces of silver," for example.
Last year I did a big Shakespeare read and discovered to my surprise that many of the famous quotes, in context, mean something very different than how they are popularly used. For instance, when Mark Antony says, "I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" he is lying and goes on to praise him and foment a revolution. Now, when I see someone playing on that quote in a title, I never know if they are using the surface meaning or the in-context meaning.
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Do you think people need to read the stories to understand the references? I've never read any ancient Greek story and I know what all those references mean. You can explain those references in a paragraph, and sometimes even a sentence.
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