Today’s Telegraph boasts a ragebait article by William Sitwell called “The loss of Latin from schools is a triumph, not a tragedy”. He did not enjoy Latin at his prep school, so he is glad that the Labour government abruptly withdrew funding for a programme that had supported Latin teaching in state schools, despite the programme being focussed on schools in deprived areas.
The prep school Mr Sitwell attended was called Maidwell Hall. Labour’s imposition of VAT on private school fees has meant that this school will soon close its doors forever. Mr Sitwell seemed sad about that when he wrote this piece: “The death of my old prep school shows Labour is hell-bent on destroying my way of life”. I would have guessed that the teaching of Latin at prep schools was a small but distinct component of that way of life. I do not know what caused the abrupt change of tone. Pragmatism, perhaps. There is probably some Latin proverb about how the man who is heir-presumptive to a baronetcy is wise to make nice to a Labour government.
Mr Sitwell – if he has some other title, he does not use it when writing in the Telegraph – clearly enjoyed enraging most his readers by writing this:
And to this day, I have no regrets. Nothing I do, say, see, observe or experience ever bears any relation to, or could possibly be enhanced by, an appreciation of Latin. It’s never helped me order a beer in Spain, have a sea urchin removed from my foot in Greece nor brought me any closer to understanding the constitutions, cultures or history of the West.
But what those Latin classes did do was fill my childhood with countless hours of pointless education when I should instead have been forced to study the likes of economics, business, entrepreneurialism, spreadsheets and profit and loss. Now that, believe me, I really do regret. Or as Erasmus probably wouldn’t have put it: “Me paenitet.”
Despite never having learned Latin myself, my sympathies lie with the majority of the Telegraph commenters who argue in favour of teaching Latin and other “useless” subjects. I suspect that if Maidwell Hall and Eton had replaced Latin with Economics, Entrepreneurialism & Spreadsheets circa 1980, Mr Sitwell would have written, with equal passion but less eloquence, about how dismal VisiCalc was and how he wishes he could have learned Latin instead.
Is it better to teach children “useful” subjects, which they can see the point of learning but which do nothing to encourage flexible thinking, and which may turn out to be completely useless if the world changes, or to teach “useless” subjects, for which the advertised benefit of “learning to learn” is small recompense for the certain disbenefit of thousands of hours of pointless toil?
I dunno. You sort it out for your own kids, or let them choose for themselves. The point is that of course the Labour government closed the Latin Excellence Programme for political reasons. They are politicians. That’s what they do. That’s what you gave them democratic power to do.
I took a couple years of Latin in 11th & 12th grades. At the time it was marketed as useful for building English vocabulary, given the Latin roots of much of the language.
My personal pet peeve was with the bulk of 10th grade math that was spent on geometric proofs, which had about as much relevance in my later life as Latin has for Mr. Sitwell. In retrospect I suppose it has some relevance in the build up to teaching calculus, but I’m inclined to think that calculus and higher math are things that one either has a taste for or doesn’t, and probably knows pretty well by secondary school whether one wants to pursue it. After taking some symbolic logic classes in college, I felt that was a much more broadly relevant subject that should have been emphasized more in lower grades.
correct answer is homeschool
My view is that teaching Latin (and Greek) was originally meant to enable people to read the Latin (and Greek) classics.
Very few of the people who study Latin, however, go on to read the classics in the original language. Therefore, i see the study of Latin as a relic, one of those government programs that survive by inertia.
That is not to say that there is no benefit from learning to translate Latin or Greek texts: it is good training for the brain, like playing chess. But i do not think that it should be financed by taxpayers.
— One could also question whether one can learn to appreciate the classics in taxpayer-funded schools.
Hobbes thought that the study of the classics should be banned because they instill a “spirit of liberty” (Hayek’s phrase, not Hobbes’).
Do you really think that State schools can teach the classics in a way that instills a spirit of liberty? I know that the school that i attended, did not.
I believe I may have been among the last cohort of students in the Province of Ontario to take Latin in high school from Grade 9 to Grade 13. Neither Grade 13 nor Latin as a high school subject exists anymore in Ontario (with regard to the former, that’s probably a good thing, in my view).
There were but four of us in my Grade 13 class: me, the teacher, an absolutely stunning girl named Cecilia and the teacher’s black Labrador (a very patient dog).
Halcyon days! I don’t regret a moment of my Latin instruction. It has stood me in good stead ever since!
Is it better to teach children “useful” subjects, which they can see the point of learning but which do nothing to encourage flexible thinking, and which may turn out to be completely useless if the world changes, or to teach “useless” subjects, for which the advertised benefit of “learning to learn” is small recompense for the certain disbenefit of thousands of hours of pointless toil?
Is your question: is it better to teach subjects that are already useless, or teach subjects that might become useless? The answer to that seems self evident to me. I see no particular way that Latin encourages flexible thinking more than VisiCalc. On the contrary, VisiCalc teaches ideas of the inter-relatedness of things and multi-dimensional connections. These are skills that carry forward to modern spreadsheets and into many other realms of life.
It seems to me that the teaching of Latin is a remnant of an old idea about university education: namely the idea of a liberal arts degree which was about producing well rounded young men (certainly not ladies — God forbid) to take their place in the upper echelons of society. From a time when the upper realms of society were obtained by birth rather than merit. Where a bit of Latin to prove oneself superior was a useful tool to keep the proletariat (not that they’d know that word) in their place.
Whereas our views of education are, or at least I think should be, rather more utilitarian — that they produce people with useful skills in a society growing ever more complex, and ever more in need of specialization.
Humphrey Appleby got a first in Classics at Oxford. We don’t really need his type anymore (though we probably still have a lot of them.)
But the most important question, addressed to @JJM is — what happened with Cecillia? In flagrante delicto? Or did she set the dog on you for even suggesting such a thing?
Latin is useful for all sorts of things. It helps with learning other European languages, with grasp of grammar in general and (along with Greek) is a gateway to an interest in ‘the classics’ which are the foundation of Western Civilisation. It can impress girls too, which I suspect does not apply to VisiCalc.
As for its overall utility, consider the position of Britain in the world when the classics were the core of the curriculum. And then contrast that with its position today, when vast numbers of students at all levels are instead taught
.
@Marius
Latin is useful for all sorts of things. It helps with learning other European languages
Isn’t learning another European language a better way to help with learning other European languages? It seems to me that that learning Spanish is just as much work as learning Latin, and if you can speak Spanish you are a hop, skip and a jump from learning Portuguese and Italian.
with grasp of grammar in general and (along with Greek) is a gateway to an interest in ‘the classics’ which are the foundation of Western Civilisation.
There are excellent translations of all of the works of the Classics in English, and they render the meaning far better than some school boy/girl hack could possibly do. Maybe there is an argument for teaching the classics (though I don’t think there is) but it would be done far more effectively in English.
It can impress girls too, which I suspect does not apply to VisiCalc.
I used to be pretty good in classical Greek. Never once was a girl impressed with this. A few of them did like my computer programming skills though. Especially when I made a program that made their name bounce around the screen flashing in different colors. (Those were simpler times….)
As for its overall utility, consider the position of Britain in the world when the classics were the core of the curriculum. And then contrast that with its position today, when vast numbers of students at all levels are instead taught the likes of economics, business, entrepreneurialism, spreadsheets and profit and loss
Britain’s current position in the world is actually due to all those egghead classic speakers getting us sucked into World War I which consumed a hundred years of accumulated capital, followed by the same eggheads (including a certain American egghead) screwing up the peace and allowing WWII which ate up whatever Britain had left. Plus all that destruction allowed America to take over the position. Mix in the eggheads who got us socialism and you have cooked up the Britain of today. Were it not for a certain lass from Grantham who got into Oxford on a merit scholarship and studied, god forbid, Chemistry and all that practical stuff, Britain would be as screwed today up as Greece is.
The people who made Britain great were the industrialists and inventors who effected the industrial revolution. The very people that the classicists looked down on as the dirty, muscular engineering class. Or the nasty merchant class with all their tawdry money lending, and their filthy sailors and dirty ships bringing Britain’s trade to the world.
What would be the evidence you would point to in order to support this claim? I am not disagreeing, it is an interesting thought and there may be some merit to it. How would you suggest I go about testing this hypothesis or researching it?
It’s the same argument for all the crazy stuff students in Singapore learn for the A levels – are they going to make use of organic chemistry five, ten years down the line?
No.
All these subjects and exams are simply a sieving mechanism to identify the best and brightest students and direct them to the most rigorous courses (medicine, law) where they could do the most good.
That said, certain subjects are better at imparting specific skills to students. E.g. sequencing, puzzle solving in organic chemistry. Interestingly enough, it seems chemistry grads do well in politics – Thatcher, Merkel.
As for Latin? It’s up to the people in charge of education whether they want it as part of the sieving criteria. I do note that languages do have greater utility than other subjects.
Lastly, I wish people in my part of the world are impressed with Latin. Whenever I give some latin quote, I just get blank stares from my wife and students.
Sigh.
Keir Starmer is a good example of what kind of men a purely utilitarian education leads. He got law degrees at Leeds and Oxford and rose up the legal profession to be Director of Public Prosecutions before becoming and MP and then PM. Turns out though Starmer doesn’t dream, doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem, and when asked these questions said these are things he’d never thought about. It shows, as the man is a robot, or as Academic Agent recently said in regards to Starmer’s Ukraine posturing, it’s Arnold Rimmer playing Churchill.
Even if this is correct, why did the classical education cause this to happen? The British elite in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century were almost all classically educated, and yet led the country to greatness, global hegemony for a long period, and a greater degree of genuine liberty than we have now . By your logic, since we have the most advanced utilitarian and non-classical education system we ever had in Britain, our current elite would be geniuses, but they are the worst elite ever in Britain, and probably the stupidest currently in Europe. You’d expect by your own logic for America’s current elite with their corporate law degrees and MBAs to be superior to the classically educated likes of Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, but we know that isn’t true.
I don’t want to overegg things. Boris Johnson exemplifies a classics education can’t overcome gross personality failures. But I don’t think classics education had much to do with British decline.
“Arnold Rimmer playing Churchill”
I’m so having that.😊
As to classics… “Bullfinch’s Mythology” did it for me. And it’s well out of copyright. Should be given away like Gideon Bibles.
@NickM
Bullfinch’s Mythology is available for download from Project Gutenberg.
Fraser Orr writes in reply to Marius, “Isn’t learning another European language a better way to help with learning other European languages? It seems to me that that learning Spanish is just as much work as learning Latin, and if you can speak Spanish you are a hop, skip and a jump from learning Portuguese and Italian.”
It is true that learning any of the Romance languages will be as much help in learning Latin as Latin will be in learning them. Ironically, the modern European language that Latin gives most help in learning is not any of its daughter-languages but German – because German, like Latin but unlike the Romance languages, uses cases. But if practical utility is your only goal, why learn any foreign language? Something that is true now that was not true thirty years ago is that English has passed the tipping point. It is the world’s second language.
History played a cruel trick on the advocates of teaching modern languages in the schools of English-speaking nations. When I was a girl their argument that, say, German was useful but Latin was not seemed unassailable. But now all their own arguments are turned against them. It takes years of study to get good enough at German to use it at a business meeting – and double that number of years for Chinese. And the odds are still overwhelming that there will be someone at that meeting who speaks English better than you speak their language.
I have not even mentioned machine translation which may spare them the trouble of learning English. So long as it doesn’t break down. (Has anyone yet done a science fiction re-telling of the story of the Tower of Babel – “And the LORD said, let us go down, and there confound their AI software, that they may not understand one another’s speech”) ?
Given all this, the use of Latin may be that it allows you to look through the eyes of people very unlike us; less like us than the Chinese, far less like us than the Germans.
For all that, I don’t particularly mourn that I did study physics (and some French and Italian) and did not study Latin. But for the vast majority of people the practicality score for study of science and mathematics beats Latin’s score by the tiniest of margins. The only way I “used” my physics and mathematics was to teach them to others, either in the classroom or through contributing to textbooks, and that was more use than most people get out of their trigonometry or calculus. The main happiness I have got from science and mathematics has been contemplative. Others have got the same pleasure from Latin.
The point of the post was not to argue that Latin should or should not be taught in state schools but to say that it is inevitable that what is taught in state schools will be subject to the whims of whoever controls the state.
Yes the Telegraph senior staff seem to enjoy having articles that will irritate readers – especially on cultural matters.
This is why I stopped buying the Telegraph.
If the Daily Telegraph will not even defend the inheritance of Classical Civilisation, what is the point of the Daily Telegraph?
There are plenty of Progressive newspapers who revel in the cultural decline that has occurred over the last century (even the Times does so – especially in its cultural sections), the Daily Telegraph is supposed to be different.
As I might have mentioned here before, I took Latin to an ‘A’ at O-level, back when that still meant something. And there’s no denying that it’s handy, every now and then.
But whether or not it’s a ‘useful’ subject misses the point entirely. Until the late teens, no child has a very clear idea of what their adult life will hold, and so nobody has any idea of what will or will not be ‘useful’ to them. I know I spent countless hours learning all kinds of things which I never, ever used in my adult life. Latin was one of them, but there were plenty of others.
I note that the bien-pensants ideas of what are and are not ‘useful’ subjects are just riddled with class prejudices. Latin is considered typical of an ‘upper-class’ education, and so is to be not ‘useful’, but ‘modern languages’ like French and German have the middle-class stamp of approval, despite not really being any more ‘useful’ to the vast majority of schoolchildren.
The reality of the matter is that most subjects in secondary education are less about being ‘useful’ to the students in their future lives than they are about being a framework that teaches children how to learn and teachers how to assess the intellectual capacities of their students. And for that purpose, Latin is as-good a choice as any other language.
llater,
llamas
@llamas
The reality of the matter is that most subjects in secondary education are less about being ‘useful’ to the students in their future lives than they are about being a framework that teaches children how to learn and teachers how to assess the intellectual capacities of their students. And for that purpose, Latin is as-good a choice as any other language.
I don’t agree. There are lots of things that almost everyone has to do, and almost everyone has to, or at least should, know. If I can pick on mathematics as an example. Obviously everyone needs a reasonable level of mastery of arithmetic. But clearly algebra is also very useful, especially in its “word problem” form. People don’t call it algebra but that is what it is. Similarly we all need some degree of geometry to understand our space, and I’d argue that although most people couldn’t tell a sine from a tangent, a grasp of the basics of trigonometry is useful to everyone. If you are familiar with them, the SAT standardized test it tests mathematics to roughly the level that most people need (which is to say practical arithmetic, applied algebra, spatial reasoning of geometry and the very basics of trigonometry.)
If we don’t use them in life perhaps that is an indictment on our education system than a real measure of their utility? Perhaps if our education wasn’t so full of flotsam and jetsam we’d have the time to dedicate to them?
However, there are two points I think are also important in mathematics that are quite neglected and misunderstood. I only vaguely remember my high school geometry in a Scottish high school, but I do know what my kids did in American high schools. One area that is much maligned and actually incredibly useful is that whole process of Euclidian geometric proofs. Everybody hates them but they teach a very pure form of reasoning that I think can be extremely helpful to people in thinking through problems.
The other big hole is probability and statistics. The level of understanding of these subjects in the general population is shockingly poor. Especially if I were to talk about not just whether they understand these subjects but whether they “groked” them, if I might use that excellent Martian word. (See foreign languages do come in useful sometimes.) Humans are not tuned biologically to a deep understanding of probability and statistics, and that served us well on the plains of Africa, but does not serve us well in our modern world.
This subject is of extraordinary utility to everyone all the time for assessing risk, making choices, analyzing data, assessing political issues, and people are absolutely terrible at it. One need only consider our recent experience with Covid to know this. How many times did you hear “if it saves one person’s life….” Perhaps if people took an extra year or two of that subject applied in a utilitarian way, instead of consuming their time with useless subjects like Latin, we’d all be better off.
I should also say that education is not just about utilitarian skills, and if I implied that I did not mean to. Part of education is the capture of the general knowledge of how to live in the world, a general knowledge of the facts of the world. Why do we teach history or geography? They give the students that basic shared community and culture that are necessary to live together in a society. To some degree I think that justified teaching Latin 100 years ago. But it is not at all part of our modern culture. I’m pretty well read, but when a colleague described a project as being in the straits of Messina. I knew where he was referring to geographically but I did not at all pick up his reference to the Homer, and I’m a person who is pretty familiar with Attic and Koine Greek.
This is one area where I think foreign languages are actually useful. It broadens that scope of that to understand the different ways different cultures think and express themselves. And of course, learning a foreign language helps with understanding your own too. So why not get a living language rather than a dead on in there?
I think, to the point of one of the earlier commentators, another area that it seems to me to be mandatory is economics. How can we not think that this is a vitally important subject to understand to be successful in life, but the level of understanding in most western societies is shockingly low. It is why “soak the rich” and “the government should provide free …” are so prevalent in people’s thinking because they simply do not understand the basic ideas of economics. So can we kick Latin out to do that instead?
And, FWIW, since this comment seems to be going long, and I’m on a roll, I also think that EVERYONE should be taught the very basics of computer programming, even if that is something as simple as how to write an excel macro. Computers are a vital part of our lives, so having at least a basic understanding of how they work seems to me to be vital, and having the tools to control them better to bend to your will is also vital. Plus of course computers are the ultimate logical machines which do what you tell them even if that isn’t what you meant. And that is of extraordinary value in many aspects of life.
I’d go one step further than most here would go.
I’d rip out our system of non-STEM post-secondary undergrad education – college – and start over.
The finishing-school-for-fine-young-gentlemen idea was over long ago. What replaced it . . . well, look at what replaced it.
Judge it by what it produces. There’s no advancement-of-civilization to it anymore. There’s no make-a-better-society aspect to it. There’s nothing of the learn-to-learn ideas. There’s no base set of survey courses on who we are and how we got here and to what we might aspire.
There’s merely tribal indoctrination.
Would you associate with the typical BA grad from any large American university? I might, but it would be in spite of their schooling.
I’d turn it all back into a STEM vo-tech. I’d leave it as it is for the sciences, the professions. Maybe as a starter course for education.
But I’d tear most of it down as a bad and useless deal meant only to enrich progressive “teachers.” If I restarted something in its place, it would cost 1/10th the current cost, and teaching would be a labor of love, not a sinecure for mandarins.