Pro Bono Publico

It is splendid news that the Government is pressing ahead with the revival of the teaching of Latin in state schools. Whatever my lot was taught instead has not made any of us Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our contemporary who is in that position was Head Boy of Winchester. The Prime Minister has a Classics degree, and he even lapses into Latin in casual conversation.

Whenever I hear any call for this or that to be taught in schools, then I ask myself how that curriculum time was currently being filled. Whether to the thing proposed or to the thing already being taught, apply the Eton Test. Would this be taught in a school that assumed its pupils to be future Prime Ministers or Nobel Laureates? If not, then fill the hours with something that was. Teach Latin. Someone will.

Why not teach coding instead? Our rulers send their own children to schools that most certainly do teach both Latin and coding. It can be done. It is being done. They would never consider going anywhere near any school that did not do it. Or why not teach Mandarin instead? The better to read Dream of the Red Chamber. Of course. Why learn any language, if not for its culture? But unlike Mandarin, Latin is fundamental to our own culture in the West. So learn them both, but learn our own first. 

While original material is still being produced and consumed in a language, then it is undeniably a living language, and that is certainly true of Latin. Indeed, a language is not dead until no one can understand it. Latin is nowhere near that. We even have a Prime Minister who can and does read it, and a subject is obviously neither useless nor unemployable if it is the Prime Minister's only degree.

But the purpose of teaching Classics is not Modern Foreign Languages; that is the purpose of teaching Modern Foreign Languages. The purpose of teaching Classics is Classics. On the absolute centrality of that to working-class culture and self-organisation, which have declined markedly since what was in practice mostly Latin has been excluded from state schools, see Professor Edith Hall's and Dr Henry Stead's magnificent A People's History of Classics, on which Professor Hall writes here, and which has this beautiful frontispiece.