A CLASSICAL DILEMMA
Peter Jones fears the effects
of excluding Latin and Greek from Mr Baker's core curriculum
WE Classicists are a pragmatic lot. Num- bers doing Latin at school fell, so we rewrote the text-books completely. Many schools no longer offered the Classical languages, so we started up summer- schools, produced courses for beginners at University, and moved into adult educa- tion. Many linguistic failures are yet capti- vated by the ancient world, so we devised courses in translation, with or without a linguistic element. The result has been a 20 per cent rise in students of Classical sub- jects at A level over the past seven years, and nearly 6,500 undergraduates spending all or part of their time on something Classical. The numbers boil down, statisti- cally, to the equivalent of more than 3,000 full-time students of Classics. The joys of the free market! But do the pundits love it?
Not a bit of it. Old-school Classicists, inside and outside the profession, infuri- ated (for some reason) that proses and verses are no longer compulsory, fulminate at the destruction of humane letters. Edu- cationists and journalists, remembering the insufferable tedium of their compulsory Latin classes, assume that this was the way Latin was supposed to be taught and sound off about 'what Latin did not do for me'. Politicians equate 'rigour' with the study of the languages and nothing else. Even some businessmen, for whom pragmatic Classi- cists have the greatest respect, continue to imagine that the education system of this country is designed to ensure that dilet- tante Classics lures away the brightest and best.
The simple fact is that they are all wrong. Proses and verses are great fun, but the creaking pastiche is the property of Punch, not the study. One may as well urge French undergraduates to get a real grip on the Bard by turning M. Mitter- rand's latest apergus into Shakespearian pentameters. The old pros who argue in this way probably regard 'real' Classics as philology and textual criticism, two activi- ties by definition almost wholly barred from anyone who does not know the languages very well indeed. It would be harder to think or a more arbitrary or crippling definition of a discipline. I won- der if say other language propagates such piffle about its 'real' value?
Those who assume that their experience of Latin 30 years ago condemns the whole subject, outright, now and for ever, should drop into a contemporary Latin class. The `rigour' argument does not work. Do some subjects come per se with sparkling, new, in-built rigour, others not? One would like to know what the subjects are. I bet I could construct a quite extraordinarily non- rigorous course in nuclear physics if I really tried. 'Rigour' or the lack of it is a consequence of the demands made upon students. The study of another culture in translation, of the sort favoured by histo- rians of all subjects and places and era, not to mention philosophers, theologians and archaeologists, can be as rigorous as learn- ing a language.
It is not as if courses in Classical lan- guages are themselves necessarily all rigour and roses. I have a cutting of a delightfully dim Oxford graduate who boasted in the Daily Telegraph two years ago about how vastly superior Greats was to courses in translation because it was only through studying the language that you knew that hybris meant 'pride'. Not only is the argument deliciously self-refuting, but hyb- ris does not mean 'pride'. This illustrates well the problem with language courses. The sheer demands of the language tend to take excessive preference over every other kind of activity such as, for example, making- sense of the culture which used works like hybris. That said, I should judge that Classical language courses in universi- ties in 1987, especially of course, at Ox- bridge, are intellectually quite as rigorous and considerably more satisfying than they were 50 years ago. One of the reasons is that far wider demands are being made on the students than the purely linguistic.
The point can be put in a nutshell. We cannot define the nature of the subject or the means by which it should be taught in terms that were relevant 50 years ago. Many students will come from schools to university nowadays with a thirst to under- stand the ancient world but without any knowledge of Latin, let alone of Greek. We are at liberty, I suppose, to do nothing about it and let them stew in their ignor- ance, but I should have thought it more profitable to construct courses to meet their needs. Given that one cannot catch Niagara in a thimble, and that mastery of the languages takes a very long time, it is not unreasonable to make work in transla- tion a large component of such a course.
The educational decision is one of scope — given that this sort of student's grasp of language is incomplete, say, and depends critically on the quality of the translation being used (and the existence or otherwise of a supporting commentary). Give an undergraduate, even one wholly ignorant of Greek, Lloyd-Jones' translation and commentary on• the Oresteia (Duckworth) and I should expect to get work of a very high standard indeed on issues such a structure, dramaturgy, religion, morality, and the history of ideas. Give a student Vellacott's translation and I am not certain you could expect anything of any value whatsoever.
The positive side of the argument is that for historical reasons we can demand that even students of Classics-in-translation must know something of the languages. That puts us Classicists in a strong position, in comparison with other arts disciplines where such demands cannot be made. If the linguistic demands made on such stu- dents are not as high as we would like at the undergraduate level, I should argue that the conditions under which we offer Classics at university these days give us no option, though it is always heartening and rewarding when students do come along who, starved of the languages at school, reach very high standards in them in three or four years.
So here we are, beavering away in schools and universities and serving the market in the best free market traditions, ensuring Classics is not the prerogative of the wealthy but accessible to all, attracting larger and larger numbers of enthusiastic Classicists of all types and at all levels when Kenneth Baker announces a national 'core' curriculum which, if put on the statute books as it stands at the moment, will have one certain consequence: it will end any interest our state schools (and, I guess, eventually, our private schools) may have in the ancient world. The subjects to be law to all schoolchildren aged 5-16 will occupy, the document suggests, 80-90 per cent of the timetable. Classics is not among them. Do the sums: ten per cent of a 40 period week is four periods, from which we can subtract one for the compulsory RE. In those three periods, we must fit subjects already in the 'core' which we hope to expand and all the minority subjects banished by law from it: including Classics.
Mr Baker assures us there is plenty of room for extra-core minority interests. Well: we can either wait and see who is right, or we can try to persuade Mr. Baker before he takes an irrevocable step that the idea of a core is not affected, in principle or practice, by a little more flexibility along the line — an option here or there, say, or sufficient guaranteed space for extra-core subjects. Otherwise, we can wave farewell to 2,500 years of culturally central human experience, and a subject (Latin) which the Americans have recently discovered is so terribly good for the brain that schools are frantically trying to re-introduce it wher- ever they can.
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