The recent proposal to boost the teaching of Latin in state schools must be one of the most bizarre follies ever to plague the British education system. What on earth is the point of learning a dead language which has a complex grammatical structure wholly unlike that of English?
The stock schoolmaster’s answer is that learning Latin is a good training for the mind. But If young minds are to be trained, far better to do so by teaching the science which controls the world about them. They should learn how Newton’s Laws of Motion govern the trajectories of cricket balls and space rockets; how osmotic pressure allows the sap to rise in tall trees; how latent heat is exploited in refrigerators and heat pumps; how water refracts light; how the smallpox vaccine came into being, and why vinegar eats marble. Most important of all should be the teaching of statistics, that superficially dull but tricky and hugely important discipline.
Why clutter up minds with knowledge as useless as the rules of heraldry or the phlogiston theory of combustion?
I suspect that the initiative comes from a handful of Tory grandees with a wholly misplaced belief in the value of a ‘classical’ education. There was some advantage in learning Latin when it was the common language of the catholic church, but those times are long gone.
A key figure in the perpetuation of the teaching of what Lytton Strachey called ‘the bleak rigidities of dead tongues’ was Thomas Arnold, appointed headmaster of Rugby in 1828. His belief in the value of Latin and ancient Greek was so fervent that he did not allow ‘physical science’ to be taught, though he did bring modern languages and mathematics into the curriculum – in small doses. He set a trend in all the major public schools which was to continue for more than a century. Its enduring legacy was one of the factors leading to Britain’s decline in technological competitiveness after the Great Exhibition of 1851. So many of the sons of the great industrial magnates learnt Latin and Greek and became ‘gentlemen’ living in country estates, rather than developing their engineering inheritance.
Yet the years immediately following Arnold’s 1828 appointment saw the final flowering of the Industrial Revolution. Following the completion of the Liverpool-Manchester line in 1830, Britain’s railway network expanded by hundreds of miles a year, and men like Arnold, who considered themselves the leaders of an intellectual elite, were happy to enjoy the speed and comfort of this new form of travel while giving no thought to the technology that lay behind it. In 1831 Michael Faraday discovered the laws of electromagnetism – leading to the creation of the generator and electric motor – in 1837 Samuel Morse demonstrated his electric telegraph, and in 1838 Daguerre and Niepce invented photography. But still Latin and ancient Greek were the mainstays of education. Oxford did not acquire its Clarendon Laboratory until 1872 and Cambridge got its Cavendish Laboratory two years later.
Even today, elements of the ‘classical’ approach are to be found in the PPE – philosophy, politics and economics – degrees so popular with modern politicians; degrees in muddle-waffle claptrap, basically. The resultant lack of a scientific background makes most government ministers especially ill-equipped to deal with such crises as the coronavirus.
So let’s have more physics, chemistry and maths, and leave Latin to specialists.
Grumpy Greybeard 