[vkou]

Teaching math, physics, and logic teaches you how to form and analyze, broadly speaking, chains of logical statements. This is an incredibly useful technical skill.

Teaching classics teaches you how to analyze writing. Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own. (This is also why I think that limiting it to Western European classics is bullshit.) We spend a lot of time reading and writing, and very little of what we produce or consume can be distilled down to chains of logical statements.

It's not going to help you derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, or figure out how to use the new flavour-of-the-week web framework, and that's fine.

[trentmb]

> Writing written by people with a vastly different perspective, culture, and assumptions then your own.

Right, a different set of axioms.

Any sort of analysis will, ultimately, be a series of arguments using the text and the set of axioms you mentioned.