The Spectator’s Notes | 19 May 2007

The attempt to get rid of ancient history A-Level, which Monday’s appearance by Boris Johnson in a toga was intended to stop, is a little saga of how ‘dumbing down’ works. No one involved set out to undermine the subject, yet that will be the effect. Instructed to squeeze down A-Levels into four units instead of six, because of the complaints about too much assessment, the Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts Board (OCR) found it hard to get agreement in what is known as the ‘subject community’. So, to achieve a ‘single suite of exams’ (the jargon is omnipresent), it decided to reduce ancient history into a ‘pathway’ in the less demanding A-Level called classical civilisation. As with the reduction of individual sciences into something called ‘double science’ at GCSE, which is said to make physics and chemistry more babyish, some of this is to do with the lack of the right teachers in state schools.