Fruits of a Classical Education,My Dear

A pertinent look at the state of Classical Education in the UK today.
I shudder to take a similar look at whats happening in India today.

Kim Karomi?


The decline of declension
Harry Mount
January 3, 2007 4:35 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/harry_mount/2007/01/post_860.html

The news that the teaching of classics in state schools is facing extinction is bloody sad news. But it's not new news.

Latin and Greek have been in decline in state schools for the last four decades, ever since successive Labour and Conservative governments began destroying grammar schools. In 1960, 60,000 children did Latin O-level. Now, 10,000 do the much more basic replacement, GCSE (and, of these, in 2003, only 1,707 came from state schools).

When it comes to A-levels, it's time to drag in the life-support machine: only 5,000 children a year take a classical A-level of any sort; that's less than 0.8% of all A-levels taken. And, if the future looks less than rosy for Latin, it's wine-dark for Greek. Fewer than a thousand children a year do GCSE Greek, squeezed out by its declining stablemate, Latin.

What is new, though, is the terribly defeatist attitude taken to propping up classics as it enters its death throes. Classics is wonderful, goes the thinking. But people are finding it too difficult, so fewer of them are doing it. The answer? Aha! Make it easier.

That's the opinion of Bob Lister, one of the last two lecturers in England to train classics teachers and the man who has carried out the latest research into the decline. Mr Lister thinks that Latin GCSEs should be made easier, with less translation from the original.

Zero out of ten, Mr Lister. To paraphrase Kingsley Amis, easier will mean worse. No one points to, say, maths, and thinks - ooh, calculus is a little difficult; let's not inflict it on the poor lambs; adding and subtracting is enough to be going with.

And the same should go for Latin. The reason why people who have done classics are often bright, with a command of grammar and an understanding of the roots of classical and English literature, is because it's actually quite hard to learn all those things. Hard, but highly worthwhile.

Learn Latin and not only will you understand English better, but you will also, more importantly, understand Latin better - the language in which some of the most stirring prose and poetry ever was written. Know Latin, and you will know world literature from the third century BC, when writers got going in Rome, through the so-called Golden Age of Latin: Lucretius, Catullus, Sallust, Cicero and Caesar; the Augustan Age: Ovid, Horace, Virgil and Livy; down to the end of the Silver Age in 120 AD: Martial, Juvenal, Lucan, Seneca, Pliny and Tacitus.

Wonderful books to know. But, like a lot of wonderful things, they need a bit of effort to be appreciated.