Those Who Did Not Attend

In The Cultural History of Modernity, Egon Friedell mentions briefly the reform of the Gymnasium curriculum in late nineteenth-century Germany. He is without illusions concerning its shortcomings, including a couple of requirements then removed (to the distress of the traditionalists), the essay, which

never was anything but a comedy of free composition, for it consisted of the empty mechanical permutation of Ciceronian phrases

 and Latin as the language of instruction:

although this was a perfect farce, for what could be sillier than a dressed-up, bespectacled petit bourgeois addressing his fellow men in the manner of the Roman Quirites?

 In his remarks on the essay, he sounds a bit like Coleridge on the composition of Latin verse in the English schools of his day.

But he goes on to say that

Indeed one can master one's own mother tongue only by way of the dead languages: without instruction in Latin one will never learn to write a precise, clear, and fluent German, and without Greek never a philosophical German; and in fact, there have been no classical German stylists who were not practiced in Latin. And the greater diffusion it once had in the middle classes is the reason that until the beginning of the twentieth century one so seldom encounters wretched German in letters, diaries, and other written work; while since then--powerfully aided by the newspapers-- it is almost the rule in private correspondence. The worth of the classical curriculum is proved less by those who had it, than by those who did not.

I don't know that this is the case for English. The barely-schooled Abraham Lincoln comes to mind as a counter-example; but then drawing inferences from genius is risky. It is true that the general level of English prose these days is pretty bad, and that the remaining classicists seem to write a lucid prose.