Uhm, what? You couldn't be more off. Traditionally, any liberal arts education would include extensive familiarity with the classics. That means Plato & Dante, at the minimum, whether a BA or BS. You were expected to know Latin and Greek because you were expected to read Latin and Greek. If you were pursuing a BS, then perhaps you would read Euclid's "Elements" instead of Thucydides' "The History of the Peloponnesian War". (&c., It's not like those were the only texts one would encounter.) But languages were a prerequisite because they lacked the chronological hubris of our age. Hence the tight coupling with Geography: notice the ties between Xenophon in translation & the role of the Ten Thousand in Geography.
My understanding is that even for native Italians it's very difficult to understand Dante as it's rather archaic. I'm not sure that being able to read Latin would be of any help.
It isn't "chronological hubris" that the vast bulk of human knowledge has been generated since 1869. Precise measurement is difficult to even define but it's difficult to imagine a non-pathological definition for which that would not be true.
Personally I'm a huge advocate for the fact that what one might call "wisdom" is not unique to our age and may indeed be getting a bit lost in the shuffle, but nevertheless, there's no way that we can go back to covering everything that took 12 years to learn in 1869 and cover all the things that take 12 years to learn today. When you push an hour into the curriculum to cover, say, the basic functioning of electricity, to name just one thing that I think one should not be able to escape from modern schooling without having gotten exposed to at some point, an hour has to come out of it somewhere else.
In what way? In the way that most of physics 'existed' back then, yes. But the vast majority of 'knowledge' (actual explanations on how nature works, mathematics, etc. etc.) was 'discovered' or 'described in detail' over the last couple of decades.
