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.