But private schools, private tutors and bestselling books are filling the vacuum, says Harry Mount. Larkin was right: there is a hunger in us all ‘to be more serious’
The decline of the British education system has been my gain, I’m only partly ashamed to confess. As somebody who has published a jokey book about a highbrow subject, I have profited from the proceeds of writing for a market that simply didn’t exist half a century ago.
In 1958, the sort of people who are buying books about Latin today were learning Latin in school. I’ve lost count of the people in their forties who’ve told me, ‘I never learnt Latin, but my parents did. I wish my children did, too.’
The desire to learn difficult things is always in us, as Philip Larkin said in ‘Church Going’ — ‘Someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious’. The problem is that schools and universities have increasingly failed to feed that hunger over the last half-century.
There are lots of reasons: the growing feeling that children shouldn’t be allowed to fail; a dislike of competition because of its supposed nastiness; an embarrassment that private and grammar schools have done better than state schools, leading to grade inflation and infantilised exams; and a hatred for old-fashioned, difficult subjects that are considered wickedly elite.
The various strands of this dastardly line of thought were neatly and idiotically woven together by the then education secretary, Charles Clarke, talking about classics a few years ago. ‘Education for its own sake is a bit dodgy,’ he said, ‘The idea that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right. Students need a relationship with the workplace.’
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in