[Pamar]

Disclaimer: I am European AND Old, so I studied Latin for 8 years (Middle School + High School).

I am not sure I really understand your comment here. If you are studying an ancient language you acquire zero fluency in it. At best you can read it, unless you were lucky enough to meet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Foster_(Latinist) (and this would apply to Latin exclusively).

So it is a bit like saying, I dunno, "in terms of proficiency per unit of effort spent" playing Street Fighter is more "efficient" than practicing a martial art in an actual gym/dojo.

[jhanschoo]

Indeed, I agree that you acquire hardly any fluency in classical languages with formal education. I suppose that I don't express this well, but I was trying to say that a natural language formally taught does not readily give you much fluency in it either, whereas immersion would give you fluency more readily and pleasurably.

My analogy would be more like this: learning dead languages in the classroom is to playing arcade flying games like how learning modern language in the sterile classroom is to a flight simulator, and immersion is pilot hours spent.

That is, with respect to acquiring skill in flying, time spent in a simulator is inferior to immersion-dominant learning, even with respect to acquiring skill for the simulator. It is in respect to the accessibility of immersion that I say that there is waste in classroom-dominant modern language learning. With arcade flying there is no such thing as arcade physics in the world, so with respect to acquiring what little skill is realistic, there is no better realistically accessible way.

[qingcharles]

I'm also old enough to have been forced to study Latin for years at school, on equal par with Spanish and French. I'm sorry I didn't take it seriously. Latin underpins so many languages, and a basis in Latin can help enormously figuring out strange words.

[Pamar]

In my home country (Italy) the "usefulness" of teaching Latin in non-technical schools (i.e. High School, basically) has been debated for at least one century now.

I do not regret having studied it, especially because I had good grades with little effort, but I came to the conclusion that yeah, maybe it would be better to devote more hours to general purpose stuff (think logic, statistics, basic accountancy and and stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow) which would probably be more useful for people who need to operate in modern society.

If you really want to study Latin or Greek (or anything like that) you can do it as a hobby, or choose a University track that includes those. But as an average citizen I think that an understanding of the numbers published by media, or the ability to manage your own budget with a spreadsheet would be definitely a better investment in terms of time.

EDIT: forgot to add that I am talking specifically of high school in Italy, I do not know if other countries already provide more "practical" forms of education to their general population.