LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

[Correspondents are requested to keep their letters are given a preference over those bearing a pseudo name and address of the author, which will be

as brief as is reasonably possible. Signed letters nym, and the latter must be accompanied by the treated as confidential.—Ed. THE SPECTATOR] WHY GREEK AND LATIN?

SIR,—In his article "Why Greek and Latin? " Mr. Jacks gives a number of reasons why, in his opinion, these subjects shoLid be included in the school curriculum. He claims that the classics are saying something that matters, and have a living interest ; that they have a positive educational value, and make

a positive contribution to the development of the whole man.

He elucidates these rather vague generalisations to some extent by claiming that the classics are the key to a story and a culture, worth studying in themselves, and a mine of interest to the average boy or girl, giving information strictly relevant to our own times, and illuminating many modern problems ; but qualifies his claim by admitting that, for most pupils, and up till the present time, these advantages are hardly ever attained, because of the technical difficulties of learning the languages. His remedy is that teaching must consist essentially of reading about Rome and Greece during a course of "four years or less."

Mr. Jacks seems to have overlooked one rather important point ; all the above aims, except the actual learning of Latin and Greek words, could be attained more effectively and much more economically of time and labour, by teaching in English. Certainly teach pupils about the social systems of Sparta, Athens and Rome, in the hope of giving them a better understanding of present social problems. But why should all pupils spend "four years or less" in learning Latin and Greek if only those who become classical scholars (as Mr. Jacks admits) get the length of appreciating social and cultural values?

This brings us to Mr. Jacks' cautious but misleading refer- ence to "transfer of training." He says there is a "growing disposition among psychologists and teachers to recognise, under certain conditions, considerable transference in school subjects, not least in the Classics," but gives no indication of the extent of this "growing disposition." Dr. Thouless [General and Social Psychology, 1937] sums up the matter as follows : "Under the present conditions of school education, transfer of training is shown to be small. Whatever we wish children to learn must be taught to them directly. If we want them, let us say, to learn to think clearly, we must teach them that, and not mathe- matics or Latin in the hope that there will be a transfer effect. Such indirect teaching will either be wholly ineffective for the purpose aimed at, or at least so uneconomical as to be unjusti- fiable. The only valid justification for teaching mathematics and Latin to children is that we want them to know these subjects. No subject can justify its place in the curriculum by its alleged value as a method of general training."

Mr. Jacks is probably, but some of your readers are probably not, aware of the most extensive investigations so far made into the question of transfer. Thorndike [Journal of

Educational Psychology, 1924, 19271, using some 8,000 pupils, found that the subjects having the greatest generally beneficial effects on school progress were arithmetic and bookkeeping, science, mathematics, Latin and French, &c., in that order. A second investigation with some 5,000 pupils gave an even

lower position to Latin. In all cases, however, the amount of the transfer was so small that the actual order is not really important, and so the conclusions of Dr. Thouless emerge.

The above considerations seem to dispose of Mr. Jacks' further claims that the classics give a gain in clarity of thought and expression, tend towards accuracy of thought, and give spiritual and intellectual, enrichment. Probably they do, but as far as the evidence shows, not any more than book-keeping or physical training do.

Mr. Jacks further claims that to know the origin of words is to know their meaning. It is truer to say that, knowing their meaning, we can see how it is connected with their origin, but that knowing their origin will usually give a wrong or inaccurate meaning when they are first encountered. A fairly extensive practice of trying to get the meanings of new words whose roots were known to pupils has convinced me that, as usual, pupils would find the meaning more economically and efficiently without even learning Latin or Greek roots. Pupils will tell one confidently that tetrarch means a ruler of four kingdoms ; that isosceles and equi- lateral both mean equal-sided, and so on. Knowledge of the roots occasionally, but by no means generally, is a help in finding modern meanings.

It would seem, therefore, more in keeping with the evidence if no child was made to learn Latin or Greek until he had reached perhaps the fourth form of a secondary school, had shown a decided talent for languages, and had expressed a desire to extend his studies of them. Instead, they should be taught directly those things that Mr. Jacks hopes, but knows usually do not, emerge from the teaching of Latin and Greek.

It is a plausible hypothesis that the general failure (as Mr. Jacks admits) of classical teaching to do what he claims it might do is one of the contributory causes of the lamentable lack of knowledge of social structure and psychological pro- cesses exhibited by the members of the present and most past British (and other) Governments. If these gentlemen had devoted as much time in learning about science and its social effects, about the technique of obtaining data on con- troversial social questions and the statistical analysis of such data, as they did in learning Latin and Greek, it is probable that we might have avoided some of the errors of the last twenty-five years which have placed us in our present position.

A better slogan than "Latin and Greek for Schoolboys' would be "Science, Psychology and Statistical Methods for

SIR,—Mr. M. L. Jacks' article in last week's Spectator on the value of Greek and Latin raises the question what authors boys should read and at what age. I have just been re- reading John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and it occurs to me that modern youth might perhaps think his record not un- worthy of emulation.

"From my eighth to my twelfth year (he writes) the Latin books which I remember reading were the BUcolics of Virgil and the first six books of the Aeneid, all Horace except the Epodes, the Fables of Phaedrus, the first five books of Livy (to which from my love of the subject I voluntarily added, in my hours of leisure, the remainder of the first decade), all Sallust, a considerable part of Ovid's Metamorphoses, some plays of Terence, two or three books of Lucretius, several of the Orations of Cicero and of his writings on oratory, also his letters to Atticus, my father taking the trouble to translate to me from the French the historical explanations in Mingault's notes. In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey through, one or two plays of Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little, all Thucydides, the Hellenics of Xenophon, a great part of Demosthenes, Aeschines and Lysias, Theo- critus, Anacreon, part of the Anthology, a little of Dionysius, several books of Polybius, and lastly Aristotle's Rhetoric." The modem scholar between the years of eight and twelve

will be rightly shocked at the unaccountable absence of Plautus and Aeschylus.—I am, Sir, yours, &c., FOXTON BROADHOLT.