The Latin issue is especially close to my heart; as a teenager, I desperately sought a Latin programme, but my American high school refused to teach such an "unprofitable" language. Even the local Benedictine college offered no Latin coursework. The adult consensus was, "Forget Latin. Take algebra." I've since managed to cop rudimentary Latin skills on the street, but the airheaded commercialism that denied me formal study has compromised my ability to make a living; Latin is a crucial skill for many professions, including the three I practice. Latin-deficient school systems are guilty of education's highest crime: they don't prepare young people for the real world.
One impediment to a credible Latin comeback is the stubborn attachment of some Latin teachers to methods that exclude oral skills. Their approach is superficially logical, but it doesn't bear close examination. Since language acquisition is principally an oral process, studying written language without the spoken component is like shoving food up your nose: it'll eventually get there, but it's tedious, unnatural, and horrifically inefficient. Victims of such lazy pedagogy even have to fall back on other languages to discuss their common language! This is the final dishonour for any tongue, especially one once so widely used as a lingua franca.
And so say contemporary Latin scholars, many of whom are struggling to restore full competency as the norm. Back in the 1980s I even heard rumours of an immersion programme wherein participants lived for several weeks in an entirely Latin-speaking community. Sadly, I haven't been able to confirm the existence of a true immersion programme, though several Latin courses describe themselves as "immersion." (In an encouraging twist, all the courses I found are in the US). However, the University of Kentucky and Mission San Luis Rey programmes clearly emphasise oral ability. That already is a vast improvement over past mistakes.
Living Latin varied tremendously across the Roman Empire according to era, social class, and ethnic group. Most of these traditions died with the official dialect or mutated into modern Romance languages. (The Vatican City is the only political entity that has maintained Latin as a living, spoken language.) Today's classroom Latin pronunciation follows three dialect-like models:
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