Tom Rogers - Reply re Latin - The Libertarian Alliance

I do hope that when young master Mercadente says he has Mr Sitwell “on my list”, he only means an e-mail list (which would certainly be apposite given his role as Director of Communications).

This debate seems to be between two basic perspectives on education:

Utilitarians, like Dr. Gabb, believe in education as something for the greater betterment of society, which requires that educators foster a cognitive elite.

Vocationalists, on the other hand, believe that education should prepare people for jobs and work. (I’ve long thought that progressivism lends itself to, and perhaps inexorable slides into, vocationalism, and as such vocationalism may be its spearhead, but that’s another matter).

The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive because utilitarianism does imply vocationalism for those outside the cognitive elite, and utilitarians are not against relevancy in education anyway. The real problem seems to be that our supposed ‘cognitive elite’ have pursued the opposite elision: vocationalism (alongside other instrumental approaches) has become predominant in the majority of schools and thereby pruned and killed off emergent meritocratic elites, leaving us with a ruling class based on wealth and family connections, rather than elite ability. Idealised utilitarian educational philosophies have been marginalised because elitism has become a dirty word and forbidden thought.

Everything has become instrumentalised and cynical: earning a grade or certificate, passing an exam, pursuing a career. The consequence is that the brightest children from state schools, if they emerge from working class families, will be culturally ignorant and may struggle with higher level studies and with fulfilling professional roles. The purpose of selective education and grammar schools was to address this by filling a gap in the cultural capital of children from ordinary families. Now everything is openly and explicitly about money, getting ahead and economic success, and standards have had to be watered down so that people can pass. This has been the case for decades, it is nothing new of course.

Perhaps the marginalisation of Latin and Ancient Greek is part of a trend, but it is a secondary consequence of two deeper things:

First, technology and economic forces have made education structurally more child-centred. This really started with the modern school textbook. I remember the old school textbooks contained little if any explication. They were simply aids for blackboard teaching and tools for rote-memorisation. They could not typically be used in isolation away from the classroom, say at home. This changed maybe in the late 80s and textbooks became more engaging, replacing the teacher as the authority and source of knowledge in the class, and could be used to complete ‘homework’ and ‘self-study’ and ‘coursework’. The teacher didn’t need to stand at the front of the class as much. Instead, kids were given exercises to do in the textbook or worked from other learning aids.

and require discipline to learn. Discipline first has to be instilled. I have not learned Latin myself, but I assume that at least in the early stages it is necessary to sit in a classroom (or the virtual equivalent) and be taught it. Learning it yourself would be a considerable undertaking with unreliable results, especially for a child. Being taught something implies deferring to someone else who is an authority on the subject: it is a disciplined, top-down, hierarchical idea of learning.

Second, parents don’t like selection in education. Selection means competition. This is politically unpopular, because it means that your child may lose out to another child. Better to just let everybody pass. Latin and Ancient Greek are, I assume, too difficult for most children, and even able children will have a disinclination towards it. It has to be taught and its use implies selection and elitism – dirty words.

Maybe this is how Rome died? I wouldn’t know on any sophisticated level because I am one of Dr. Gabb’s “high-tech barbarians”. I am ‘high-functioning thick’. I attended a working class northern comprehensive and never had the chance of a classical education. Had there been that opportunity, you would have been met with mostly blank and uncomprehending faces, with me and maybe one or two others being the enthused minority. That classroom split would have been reversed if, instead, you had conducted all classes in a workshop. To be realistic about it, the vocationalists [really progressives in disguise?] have a point in the practical sense. Maybe they are crude and ignorant and have proletarianised education, but utilitarian arguments will always be weak if fought on vocationalist ground because the virtue of Latin and Ancient Greek are their irrelevancy, or counter-relevancy. It’s the very fact that you are teaching a child how to light a fire in a wood or shoot an air gun or sleep in a bivy bag at the top of a mountain, things he will never do as an overweight, middle-class suburbanised adult, that make it a virtue and a noble mission.