In the July 1918 issue of the Ontario Agricultural College Review, a Harvard-educated botanist named J. B. Dandeno published an essay titled "Practical Work and a Liberal Education" that reads like it could have been written for a 2025 op-ed page. His argument was blunt, almost reckless for a man working inside the academy: the entire Western education system was still infected by a kind of intellectual disease inherited from the Middle Ages, and most of what passed for "educated" was nothing of the sort.

book education such as may be gained from a study of Latin, Greek and Ancient History, of Medieval Art and Belles Lettres, has contributed but little to the advancement of the human race in proportion to the time spent upon these subjects.

This alone would have been fighting words in 1918, when Latin was still a prerequisite for university admission across the English-speaking world. But Dandeno went further. He argued that the worship of classical languages wasn't merely outdated — it was a form of inherited superstition:

Whether we may be willing to recognize it or not, we have still with us a strong tendency to worship at the shrine of the god of language, and we have still with us much superstition and mediaeval prejudice.

He then offered what might be the most radical redefinition of education in the document: "The extent of a man's education may be measured by his appreciation of, and his acquaintanceship with, his environment." Not by what he had memorized. Not by the prestige of his institution. By how well he understood the world directly around him.

To drive the point home, Dandeno described a man in an Ontario town who had attended grammar school decades earlier and memorized a few Latin sentences, "which he was not only able but very willing to quote in season and out of season." The implication is clear: this man was considered learned by his neighbors, but was, in Dandeno's judgment, "in the true sense largely uneducated."

What makes this remarkable is the context. Dandeno was writing during the First World War, at a moment when the catastrophic failures of European civilization were impossible to ignore. The most classically educated nations on earth were slaughtering each other in trenches. Meanwhile, Dandeno was trying to get agriculture — the science of feeding people — accepted as a serious subject in Ontario schools, and meeting resistance from academics who considered it beneath them.

His argument anticipates by decades the progressive education movements of the mid-twentieth century, the STEM-versus-humanities debates of the 2010s, and today's growing skepticism about whether university education delivers practical value proportional to its cost. The specific framing — that reverence for classical education is not rational preference but inherited prejudice, a kind of cultural inertia from monastic traditions — is strikingly modern. It predates the sociological concept of "cultural capital" that Pierre Bourdieu wouldn't formalize until the 1970s.

Was Dandeno right? Partially. His dismissal of classical learning was too sweeping — the humanities have contributed enormously to human advancement in ways that resist simple measurement. But his core insight holds: confusing the signals of education (Latin quotations, prestigious credentials) with education itself is a trap societies fall into repeatedly. And his proposed alternative metric — how well you understand your own environment — remains a quietly devastating standard that most modern graduates would struggle to meet.