Ask Reginald Foster:
"In a country like the US where the existence of other languages is constantly hidden from sight, the educational experience of trying to think in another language is becoming rare, and in a century where languages will become extinct by the thousands, it will be useful to have an area study of the past where it is still possible to think, again, thanks to the contingency of the evidence, in the dead language of communities of the past."
Alessandro Barchiesi on Classics and the future, 2014 (bold added)