Pro Bono Publico?

Of Mice and Men is about racism, so it has ... oh, what is the point? We have also heard your arguments against the teaching of Latin in state schools other than your children's. Now give us your arguments in favour of "graffiti workshops" instead. In fact, tell us what a graffiti workshop is. And convince us that you would send your children to schools that had them at all, never mind instead of Latin.

If your school teaches coding, then it probably teaches Latin. And teach Mandarin, the better to read Dream of the Red Chamber. Why learn any language, if not for its culture? But Latin is fundamental to our own culture in the West. Learn them both, but learn our own first. 

While original material is still being produced and consumed in a language, then it is undeniably a living language, and that is certainly true of Latin. Indeed, a language is not dead until no one can understand it. Latin is nowhere near that. But the purpose of teaching Classics is not Modern Foreign Languages; that is the purpose of teaching Modern Foreign Languages. The purpose of teaching Classics is Classics. On the absolute centrality of that to working-class culture and self-organisation, which have declined markedly since what was in practice mostly Latin has been excluded from state schools, see Professor Edith Hall's and Dr Henry Stead's magnificent A People's History of Classics, on which Professor Hall writes here, and which has this beautiful frontispiece.