Notes on the Teaching of Latin
Condemnant quod non intellegunt
It is always surprising when the Conservative government decides to do something conservative. Two weeks ago the idea that it should fund and promote the teaching of Latin in public schools would have been seen, not a prospective piece of policy that would actually be executed, but rather another wet-dream fantasy of one of those unfortunate looking Blue Labour types that follow me on Twitter.
On its face, the scheme is a welcome one. Conservative educational reform has tended to focus on cutting back funding for what it considers superfluous subjects, like arts and literature, in favour of propping up the demonstrably profitable ones, like science, computing and, to some extent, foreign languages. Their tendency to do so, though motivated by a futile attempt to replace the better-educated foreign workforce which props up our specialised industries with a homegrown native one, may at least have the benefit of deterring those who ought never to step foot in a university from doing so. As a student of literature I routinely came into contact with people who had chosen the subject simply because it got them into the university, and who found that, without having read any of the material, they could nevertheless speak on it with an assumed authority in seminars without ever being called out. Back in the day a fellow student of mine, who admitted to us in the hallway before class on Moby Dick that she hadn’t read a single page of the book, surprised us all when, during the class, she began arguing passionately that the whale represented the plight of black Americans, a thesis that the spotty PhD student leading the class found “very interesting.” Audentes fortuna iuvat.
The study of Latin, though it may be superfluous to the economy, does at least require the student to have demonstrable skill and talent. Wrestling with the conjugations and declensions of a dead language, as impractical as it may be in itself, does improve one’s ability to understand one’s own language, as well as giving one the advantage when it comes to studying Spanish, French or German, a task which will be comparatively easy to anyone that has been made to trawl through Lingua Latina.
Nevertheless the idea that the next generation of state school children, of which I once counted myself among, should have direct access to the words of Cicero, Ovid and Juvenal, does not quite sit right with me, and I doubt it will please the rest of my generation who were subjected to the same abysmal comprehensive syllabus which the Labour party and preceding Conservative government had concocted for us. After five years of modern language education, my contemporaries and I could barely string together an “Ich spiele fußball mit meinen freunden” in the oral exam without our teacher gesticulating and mouthing wildly on the other end of the recording device to get it out of us.
Why then, after my generation was robbed of grammar schools and subjected to the lowest standards of education, should the succeeding have that “clean sea breeze of the centuries” blowing through their minds in the form of Latin? It simply isn’t fair. England is widely acknowledged to have one of the poorest education systems in the Western world, and yet our economy plods along quite nicely. By all means, let the government put money and thought into turning the next generation into cheeky, cockney electricians and plumbers. They will at least earn decent money, and I couldn’t envy them that. But the idea of a sixteen year old boy from the same muddling lower-middle class background as I being able to quote Tacitus is more than my pride would be able to handle.
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