The Latin for the Judging

[steepholm]

Because my comprehensive school had (until the year before I went there) been a Secondary Modern, it didn't teach Latin, preferring to specialise in woodwork and cross country running. This made me really cross, aged 11.

Now I hear that Gavin Williamson wants to introduce Latin to state schools, basically so that they can be more like private schools. (Although, if he wants them to be more like private schools, giving them the same budget per pupil would be a shorter way.)

He also adds that Latin will help pupils learn modern languages - which it might with some of them, although perhaps not as much as, you know, actually teaching those languages. (Data point - the number of primary schools employing a foreign language assistant halved between 2018 and 2020.)

Both these reasons seem manifestly specious/dishonest. Why else might Williamson want pupils to learn Latin? Could it be that he's keen to see people being able to enjoy Latin poetry and prose for its own sake? That would be an excellent reason, but his recent pronouncements on the uselessness of the arts suggest it's an unlikely motivation.

Which leaves what was always the most plausible option - that Gavin Williamson is driven by venal sucking up to Boris "Greats" Johnson, and a shallow Latin-tag-dropping snobbery. Perhaps he's also compensating for the fact that he too went to a cross-country-running comp? It takes people different ways: some of us prefer to conjugate, others simply decline.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I went to a grammar where they did teach Latin (for which I was considered too stupid but hey, I only ended up speaking three languages, two of which are romance).

I'd have given a lot to have been at a sec mod, where I might have survived to take some exams before leaving.

Williamson is a strange cove. Wonder if he's any relation to Sir Joseph of that ilk who founded the school that I went to?

[gillo]

I'm quite grateful I did Latin. It was a struggle, because I started later than my class because of a school change, then two years later I had to drop it for six months and pick it up later, mostly in lunchtime lessons. Moving schools rendered me incapable of doing science, but languages were easier to drop and pick up.

It requires you to analyse the structure of your own language in order to translate, because it is so heavily inflected, which English isn't, and having that concept did help me a bit with Anglo-Saxon. Latin O Level was actually a requirement to do English at Durham in my day!

All that said, Williamson is off his head. At a time when so many children are desperately in need of help, and the learning gap is growing, this is the last thing money should be thrown at. Nobody expects you to know Coptic when you start Egyptology, so why should you need prior Latin to do Classics? More art, music, drama, craft skills are a much higher priority, especially when so many schools have reduced them to a bare minimum. And I think sucking up to Johnson (a not very good Classicist by all accounts) is probably his primary aim.

[cmcmck]

I'd forgotten that you are a fellow Anglo Saxonist! :o)