Schools: Classics

Lord True Excerpts

Tuesday 6th November 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord True]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for introducing this debate. It was also a pleasure to hear from a fellow Peterhouse classicist. If Professor Ted Kenney was not happy with him then, he certainly would be now.

It is 53 years since I was introduced to Kennedy’s Latin primer—or Kennedy’s eating primer, since some assiduous boy had altered every front cover at my school. Forbidding though the fruit may have seemed at first, the eating of it ever since has been a pleasure and a delight. As others have said, a classical education needs no other justification than the pleasure it gives. It opens a window into the mindset that has created or informed some of the greatest achievements of art, literature, architecture and music, not just in classical times, but over all the centuries of civil education until, I regret to say, the modern, vandalistic and often deliberate sundering with all that was beautiful and good in the past culture of European nations.

I think it matters, too, at the individual level. If you are in a country church and see the carved memorial of a talented young woman who died from consumption in the neoclassical 1820s or, perhaps, the proud epitaph of a rather unsuccessful Venetian admiral, you can—if you know Latin—cross the wall of death and enter the world of that person. If you know no Latin, they lie dead and cold for ever. Not a week goes by without my reading or using Latin. I regret not a moment of that and I certainly, as the noble Baroness said, do not regret the discipline and precision of expression that comes from it.

Abbott and Mansfield followed a few years later—and the beautifully flexible Greek language has given me equal pleasure. I was probably one of the last who went through the university tripos, translating and writing prose and poetry both ways. I am not going to venture to be torn like Cinna the poet by this intelligent Committee by trying some of my verses on you, my Lords.

We recently did a straw poll of local secondary schools. Almost all the independent schools offer classics; of the state schools, two established academies offer none and the other offers Latin from year 7. Of the maintained schools, one offered no classics; neither did the second. It believed there was no demand for it. Two others do offer extracurricular Latin and each has about 30 takers at key stage 3. The last one sends four year 10s to a local independent school to study Greek.

I am sure that this mixed picture is fairly typical and I make no criticism of those that do not offer classics. Overexpansion of the curriculum did have an impact; I know that my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford is addressing this and I support him. I urge him, as he reforms what is taught, not to fall under the influence of those with a utilitarian delusion that what is taught is a school for work, not a school for life.

I have one final thought. In taking classics to fresh places, let us please not fight shy of the critical place of grammar, as the noble Baroness said, in the name of accessibility. All my children were offered Latin; the first worked to greats at Oxford; the second to A-level; the third fell by the wayside at GCSE. When I asked her why, she said that she was bored with the discovery method of learning used to try to work out what the ending “amus” meant for herself, when her brothers had learned their “amo, amas, amat” in a day and have remembered it ever since. Ironically, she would have preferred to have been taught like them. Therefore, let us not neglect the essential foundations of grammar, which, as others have said, equip us to confront so many languages, including that poor mauled old thing that is our own language.

Finally, will the Clerk of the Parliaments help us? Can we please have some Latin back on the business of the day?