Dumb and dumber

At the end of January the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, declared that ‘Education for its own sake is a bit dodgy’. ‘The idea,’ he went on, ‘that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right. You need a relationship with the workplace.’ He also said that he didn’t care too much whether anyone studied the classics any more, and even added it might not be such ‘a bad thing’ if there were to be a decline in highbrow subjects at university altogether. So, nearly 150 years after Charles Dickens invented – and pilloried – Mr Gradgrind, with his ‘facts, facts, facts’, hard times are back in English education.

Only 0.2 per cent of GCSEs taken in this country are in Latin, and only a fraction of that in Greek. The study of classics has dwindled. Many people will not rue the fact that such ‘elitist’ skills as using the aorist in Greek, or conjugating Latin irregular verbs, are virtually extinct. But so, therefore, is the ability to read the Iliad, the Odyssey or the Aeneid in their original languages, or to understand all the nuances of Plato and Aristotle, or the legal and political writings of the Roman Republic. And if some people really think our country is better off as a result, or that the cause of civilisation is thereby advanced, then God help them, and us.

In 1869 Matthew Arnold, poet, critic, sometime school inspector and son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, published one of the greatest works of the 19th century: Culture and Anarchy, a critique of Britain’s social and political life. Here he dealt definitively with the questions that still vex today’s educationists. Britain, at the time, had just witnessed the agitation that forced a Conservative government to pass a second Reform Bill, extending the franchise to the new middle classes, and the great thinkers of the day were concerned with one overriding question: how to get a largely uneducated population ready to play a larger role in an expanding democracy.