Education

One does not like to disagree with one’s editor, but while the image of Rome salting the earth of its bitter rival Carthage is a striking way of describing Labour’s plan to wreck our current system of education, Rome was not in the habit of destroying the advantages that its conquests produced. The salting story is a 19th-century invention, endorsed by no less an authority than the Cambridge Ancient History (1930), but now rescinded. As Mr Gove made clear in last week’s magazine, the universal imposition of a national curriculum, among other measures, will remove the freedom and choice – the two words you will find nowhere in discussion of

Schools are a relatively new phenomena in human history. In Britain, they expanded in the 19th century and early 20th century in step with industrialisation and urbanisation, but in many places in the world, what little education the young receive occurs at home. The assumption most share, not unreasonably, is that where there are schools to attend, parents should send their children to them so they can avail themselves of the opportunities for academic learning, for socialisation and working through what they might do after they leave with the rest of their lives.  Covid gave an enormous boost to homeschooling The number of children being home-schooled in the last hundred

The headmaster of one of the best comprehensives in the country was once asked the following question by Tony Blair: ‘If you could do one thing to improve state education in this country, what would it be?’ ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ he said. ‘I’d line up every civil servant in the education department and machine gun the lot of ’em.’ No prime minister has ever asked me that question, but my answer would be more diplomatic. It would be to insist that every incoming education secretary memorise the serenity prayer. This is the prayer that members of Alcoholics Anonymous recite at the end of their meetings: ‘God, grant me the serenity

Last month, after 21 years studying and teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge, I resigned. I loved my job. And it’s precisely because I loved the job I was paid to do, and because I believe so firmly in preserving the excellence of higher education, in Britain and beyond, that I have left. When I arrived in Cambridge two decades ago, giants were still walking the earth. Students could attend any lecture, at any level, in any department; graduate and research seminars were open to any interested party, and you could sit at the feet of the greats. Unforgettable gatherings of everyone from undergraduates to professors would discuss the

The welfare state was designed to serve everyone’s needs. But those needs were defined by the state. So schools teach fronted adverbials (but what about hindmost ones, eh?) and trigonometry, and may (absurdly) have to teach maths to all up to 18. Do these really fulfil the needs of all our children, far too many of whom are not (apparently) leading happy, useful lives? In the ancient world education was for the sons of the elite, to prepare them to run the country. But some elite Romans did without it. When Marius, who early on made his mark in battle and was picked out as a likely leader of men,

Lessons to learn Sir: Your leading article ‘Requires improvement’ (7 September) rightly raised concerns that a curriculum review in England might reverse the excellent progress in schools following the Gove reforms. Fortunately, there are two very good examples of what happens when you replace rigour and the acquisition of knowledge with left-wing dogma and woolly thinking. The introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland has led to a dramatic fall in standards in Scottish education and a resultant collapse in its Pisa [Programme for International Student Assessment] ranking. Last year Wales recorded its lowest-ever Pisa ranking. Its new national curriculum is closely based on the Scottish model, so it

It’s only been a month since the new Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, declared that the ‘era of culture wars is over’. Yet this morning the Daily Telegraph reports that teachers in training courses will be taught to challenge ‘whiteness’ in lessons, to ensure future educators are ‘anti-racist’. The guidance in question has emerged from universities, rather than from the government itself – specifically from the National Education Union in England (and funded by Newcastle University) and from ten universities north of the border who have endorsed an ‘anti-racism framework’ drawn up by the Scottish Council of Deans of Education. Some of the guidance includes instructions on how to ‘disrupt the

Labour’s new education secretary wishes, as usual, to change everything. She might consider the advice of the Roman educationist Quintilian (d. c. ad 100). In the ancient world education was for the elites, and its purpose was to prepare them to be statesmen and power-brokers. That required mastery of both history, since that was the only way to understand the future, and verbal persuasion, because power depended upon winning legal and political arguments. The building blocks of education were acquiring a firm grasp of grammar and right usage, and reading widely across history and the best literature, poetry and philosophy. But above all else, that education must produce good men

Summer study courses for young composers have been popular for a few generations. After the second world war, up-and-coming experimental composers started flocking to places like Darmstadt in Germany for the Internationale Ferienkursen für Neue Musik. Olivier Messiaen taught there in the late 1940s and 1950s, when among his students were Stockhausen and Boulez. Attending the 1980 course as an undergraduate, I benefitted from a lesson with Brian Ferneyhough and conversations with Wolfgang Rihm, who died last week and was described in one obituary as ‘the last great German composer’. In the US, the summer activities at places such as Tanglewood and Aspen have become part of the learning process