Cultivation of the Mind
When one learns Latin, one learns something more than just how to speak it.
Baron Jérome-Frédéric Pichon (1812-1896) in a letter to Georges Vicaire (1853-1921), quoted in the Almanach du Bibliophile (Paris: Eduoard Pelletan, 1899), p. 94. My translation:
For many people the newspaper has killed the book, and the education that young people recieve today is certainly not the same as the one we had, which used to be confined to a thorough study of antiquity’s greatest works. It was a wonderful and enriching cultivation of the mind, making one fit for all kinds of study in the same way that successively working and fertilizing the land prepares it for bountiful harvests. The modern reformers have not understood this. People do not speak Latin any more, so why learn it? They did not realize that, when one learns Latin, one learns something more than just how to speak it. The knowledge or ignorance of that admirable language is instantly apparent in works written in our own French, that noble and dignified daughter of Latin.
Latin has helped me navigate Romance languages I don't speak (Portugese, for instance). Even in English, a word I don't know might soon be understood by parsing its Latin roots--no dictionary needed.
Well, I'm certainly grateful for the 3 years of Latin that I had in high school. My teacher was the last Latin teacher in the system. When she retired, that was the end of it.