The classics have virtually vanished from our state schools. Dr Peter Jones MBE, who writes the regular Ancient and Modern column in The Spectator and is now advising the Classics for All campaign, explains why we need to save Latin from educational oblivion…
Bettany Hughes was recently filming in a small village in Syria. The village children gathered round to find out what she was doing and Bettany told them she was making a film about ancient philosophers. ‘Oh’ they said, ‘We have those.’ ‘Really? Who in particular?’ asked Bettany. ‘Why, Socrates and Aristotle’ they replied. The world swam briefly before her eyes before she picked herself up, dusted herself down and got on with the filming.
Which raises the question: if children in village schools in Syria know about the great ancient classical thinkers, why don’t all our children?
For the past 22 years, ever since the advent of Baker’s wretched National Curriculum, Classics – Latin, ancient Greek, classical civilisation, ancient history – has been a disciplina non grata, given no official status within schools. Any state school that did take it on gained no credit for it in any assessment of the school’s achievements.
That transparent lack of interest also emerges in the government’s record-keeping. In the House of Lords, 24 May 2011 Lord Pattern asked how many classics teachers there were in English state comprehensives since 1990. Lord Hill of Oareford replied with a government chart revealing the following deranged sequence of figures: 1992 – 1,300; 1996 – 500; 2002 – 1,000; 2007 – 200. Assuming one classics teacher per school, eight hundred were dropped in the four years 1992-6; five hundred then rehired in 1996-2002; only for eight hundred to be dropped again in 2002-7. This is transparently nonsensical, as the Department of Education well knew. For it reveals in the footnotes that the figures were drawn from ‘an occasional survey most recently run in 1992, 1996, 2002 and 2007, a representative stratified random sample. As the numbers of classics teachers and schools offering classics are relatively small, the likelihood of the drawn samples accurately estimating the national number of classics teachers is relatively low’. Thanks a lot. But those were the figures they kept, and they presumably controlled policy.
Yet, amazingly, the full range of classical subjects does survive in some schools, and where it does, it flourishes. That is solely the result of teachers’ heroic efforts, against all the odds, and certainly no thanks to government. When Friends of Classics eighteen months ago professionally surveyed those thousand schools where something classical was taught, the response of parents and non-classical staff was in the region of 75-90% in favour. Indeed, as a result of the efforts of the Cambridge School Classics Project and its magnificent royalties from the Cambridge Latin Course (easily the biggest selling Latin course in the world), six hundred state schools have started Latin in the past ten years. And the government response? To cut the number of classics teachers it trains. Well done.
So, as usual, classicists will just have to prop up the education system ourselves. Not that we want to force any classical subject down anyone’s throats (as if we could). We just want to make it available to as many of our state schools pupils as possible – the 3,000 (c.75%) where nothing classical is taught at all – and that is what the new fundraising charity Classics for All is doing, with its first distribution of grants to projects that will do the business. But why?
The cynical answer is to protect jobs. If only! There is currently a desperate shortage of classics teachers, with almost twice as many retiring every year as are trained. Some of our advocates are not very helpful either. I am reminded of the ‘well-known ex-headmaster’ in 1934 who was quoted in an introduction to a Latin reading book: ‘If I were in a runaway motor-car, and the driver had to dodge a dog, put his foot on the right one of three pedals, and show presence of mind in handling the steering-wheel, the prayer I should put up would be: I hope this fellow has learnt Latin’. I am not certain it would have been mine.
The actual reason for studying the ancient world is that, as most of those who have studied something classical know, the subject is of consuming interest in itself and of lasting value too, linguistically, culturally and historically.
‘Evidence!’ you cry. Earlier on this year the charity Friends of Classics asked the distinguished market researcher Colin McDonald (of McDonald Research) to carry out the first ever professional survey of the value that those who had studied a school subject attached to it in later life. YouGov had the educational records of 80,000 of the 185,000 they use for survey and polling purposes, and 10,000 of them turn out to have studied something classical. So we asked YouGov to carry out a survey of their perceptions. With a slight bias in favour of those who had studied ancient Greek (because so few do), they otherwise randomly surveyed 2,700, of whom 2,182 replied – an extraordinary 81%.
McDonald’s full report can be read at www.friends-classics.demon.co.uk via the button on the home page. The figures that really amazed me were those that emanated from people who had studied something classical up to age sixteen, but no further (just over a third of the sample). These were most likely to have done so under compulsion, and most likely therefore to have hated every minute of it. While scores on a five point scale under ‘use for training’, ‘creativity’, ‘adaptability’ and ‘strategic thinking’ hovered around a perfectly creditable 50% when it came to giving positive responses (‘beneficial’, ‘very beneficial’), try the following: help in working life 65%, verbal/speaking ability 81%, writing skills 81%, logic/reasoning ability 73%, general quality of life 77%. Since two thirds of the survey’s respondents were over fifty, many of this cohort were acknowledging the influence on their lives of classics at least 35 years or more after their study had finished.
Not a bad return, really, for a subject studied to sixteen. No wonder 83% of this same cohort thought Latin and Greek should be regular school subjects. They know its value. Like the village children in Syria. And unlike the heads of 3,000 UK state schools.
I was the only boy at my school of 600 to study latin, taking two classes a week in my spare time, sitting in the passenger seat of my french teacher’s car and going through the Latin Reading Course book whilst my teacher ate his packed lunch. I would love for my kids to be able to study latin too (by their own volition) and think it would be a real shame if they were not even offered the chance
We just bought my daughter Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis which seems to nicely fill the gap between the modern grammars and the classics.
Once it became optional (fourth form), only one pupil in my year chose to study Latin too, and it wasn’t me.
In the perennial debate about whether Latin is (a) an essential element in a proper education or (b) a timewasting Dead Language, I’m in a tricky spot. I instinctively agree with all the pro-Latin arguments in theory, but the truth is that at school I found it crushingly tedious. This may well have been the way it was taught – a series of abstract and baffling verb endings and declensions, which you had to memorise as homework ready for a frightening spot-check test on a Tuesday morning. All to no clear purpose, and it didn’t help that the teacher had a unnerving personality disorder that we would now call ‘bi-polar’.
So, like all my contemporaries except that one brave girl, I dropped it as soon as I could. I did however opt for something called Classical Civilisations, along with one other boy and two girls. It was the same bipolar teacher but the subject matter was infinitely more interesting – Homer, Pompeii, what the Romans did for us etc. I suspect if this had been taught first as the compulsory subject, many more pupils would have gone for a subsequent Latin language option.
Luckily at my prep school we started with a year of ‘classical civilisation’ classes at age 7 before starting Latin proper at 8, so I think you are right Brit, it needs some context first to bring it alive! Incidentally, Boris’s book on Rome would be a fun book to introduce youngsters to the romans. I suppose a programme on Latin similar in scope to what ‘bang goes the theory’ does for science would be a good place to start but I’m not holding my breath
Some Latin would have come in handy reading that Cotswold Village book recommended here a while ago. I tried online for some translations but no joy.
In my school learning Latin was compulsory (amo, amas, amat…) until you could prove inept in exams. I think I scored 21%, an obvious fail, and was spared additional compulsory ancient Greek the following year. I have no regrets personally but feel it’s a shame if no one wants to take them up.
A professor of classics I know at an American university said that her program’s graduates have no trouble finding jobs, for the word is out that the study of Latin improves test scores. I didn’t think to ask her how many the program graduates every year.
I know of two schools with compulsory Latin in the Washington, DC, area: Washington Latin Public Charter School, which started about five years ago, and St. Anselm’s Abbey School, which started in the 1940s. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that The Heights (Roman Catholic, very conservative) requires Latin, for I once saw one of their students doing Greek homework on the metro.
I think that Brit makes a good point. Ford Madox Ford (I think it was) suggested that classical scholarship declined when corporal punishment went out of fashion. When the teacher can threaten a beating, it doesn’t really matter how tedious the method of dragging the class through conjugations and declensions. Without that sanction available, the teacher must know not only Latin, but how to teach; that narrows the field of desirable recruits.
There is also the question of “why Latin”, and here I think that the very American answer “better test scores” really doesn’t help. I assume that Washington Latin has it in mind to emulate the Boston Latin School, which has been around a very long time (as Americans count), and has produced many distinguished graduates. The monks who control St. Anselm’s probably just can’t imagine graduating boys who don’t know any Latin–it is, after all, in some sense the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. All that considered, what if one cares not a bit for Henry Adams or George Santayana or any other Boston Latin graduate, and is not Catholic, or is Catholic and without aspiration to practice Canon Law? Why not skip amo, amas, and move right on to SAT prep courses?
Latin, of course, can be incredibly important if you want to pursue a legal career.