We tend to forget now, but multiple generations of schoolchildren once shared the common phobia of attending compulsory Latin lessons. The lessons largely ebbed away through the 1970s, even in private and religious schools, and became a matter of choice—an eccentric one, to be sure—wherever Latin remained. A mythology of mortification developed around the ordeal, one that went hand-in-hand with the more general notion of education as a necessarily grim character-building experience. No child took to it with alacrity...

Read more from the Wall Street Journal here.