From the great Soviet sociologist and futurist Igor Bastozhev-Lada, I saw why Latin and ancient Greek were taught in gymnasiums in the days of the tsars, and today in the West in a number of privileged private schools: "In the royal gymnasium, Latin and ancient Greek could be needed in the lives of a fraction of one percent of the graduates. Why did they torture the others? Then, in this way the "children of ", who could not afford such meaningless luxuries, were cut off from the gymnasium."