Saturday 25 March 2017

Rejoinder to a Self-Appointed Policeman of Privilege

Strapline: LATIN FOR IDIOTS
This week saw the publication in the Spectator of a splenetic piece of propaganda by one James Delingpole, who makes his living from peddling archly controversial far-right views on climate change and immigration. This time he dilates, with mind-blowing ignorance, on the topic of classical education. The single most serious problem affecting British education, apparently, and one which the Spectator believes it is worth giving airspace to someone of Delingpole’s lousy journalism skills to discuss, is that there are TOO MANY STATE-EDUCATED UNDERGRADUATES READING CLASSICS AT OXFORD.*

I quote: ‘Take, for example, the right-on enthusiasm for recruiting Greats candidates from schools that don’t do Latin or Greek. The theory goes that by the fourth year, these eager state-school kids will have attained the same proficiency as private-school ones who have been hothoused on classics since they were eight or nine. But I gather that only the Oxbridge classics tutors who have drunk the social justice Kool-Aid actually believe this has worked in practice. The rest are worried about declining long-term standards and are also a bit frustrated: if you’re an Oxbridge classics don, you want to teach Oxbridge–level classics — not catch-up for beginners.’
Is this the best Classical Edification  can offer the 21st Century?


As an ex-Oxford Classics don (1995-2001), I can confirm that the last sentence was, at least then, sadly, true. Amongst my former colleagues were too many who took applicants from the private sector in numbers wholly disproportionate to their status as only 7% of the school-leaver population. 

Things have certainly changed for the better since 2001. But this matters little if state-educated people think that Classics remains a snobbish subject, and are too scared to apply to Oxford anyway. This is hardly surprising when Oxford produces arrogant alumni with ropey cognitive skills like Delingpole, who boasts, ‘it really did shape my intellect in a way for which I’ll be eternally grateful.’ Enough said.

But Delingpole’s premise that a life-transforming Higher Education in Classics is only possible after training, from primary school, in Latin and Greek languages, is daft. Not only can people learn Latin and Greek to a dazzling standard fast, but the most precious aspects of the Greeks' and Romans' culture can be learned without any ancient language at all.

They had some bad ideas, including the inevitability of slavery and the inferiority of women. But they also conceived superb ideas, including democracy, freedom of speech, accountability of officials, the social contract, trial by jury, tolerance of a wide range of sexual relationships, rational science, philosophical logic, world-citizenship, cultural relativism, training in public speaking, and the profound responsibility of the makers of art and entertainment to society.

Jefferson
The failure to include classical subjects taught in translation—Classical Civilisation or Ancient history—in every secondary educational institution therefore deprives our future citizens of access to educational treasures which not only enthral, but fulfil what Jefferson argued in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782) was the true goal of education in a democracy—to enable us to defend our liberty. The past, he argued, is the subject which makes citizens so equipped. 

To stay free requires also comparison of constitutions, utopian reflection, fearlessness about innovation, critical, lateral and relativist thinking, advanced epistemological skills in source criticism and the ability to argue cogently. All these skills can be learned via English translations of the succinct, entertaining, original works produced by the lively minds of the authors of the classical past.


Delingpole has needlessly insulted every individual who has ever studied the ancient Mediterranean world wholly or even partially in translation—the thousands who take CC/AH qualifications in state schools, the majority of classics undergraduates in other British universities, not to mention adult learners, autodidacts, and everyone who has ever read a Penguin Classic. He has done so with puerile, ill-informed, oligarchic hauteur. If this has made you as cross as it did me, then please read this article in the Guardian and join my new campaign, ACE, to get classical subjects into every state school in the land. Now I’m off to the People’s History Museum in Manchester to research workers’ campaigns for access to Higher Education.

*I did have a photograph of Delingpole in bathing shorts here but have taken it down after someone quite rightly pointed out that I was stooping to 'body shaming'. I agree and apologise for any offence caused.

4 comments:

  1. Attitudes such as this make my blood boil. I went to a public school in one of the poorest socio-economic suburbs in Brisbane. I had to take ancient history (the Australian equivalent of Britain's classical civilisation courses) through correspondence because my school could not offer it.
    When I attended my first undergraduate Latin class at The University of Queensland, my teacher informed the class that she would need to teach us proper English grammar because none of us, including the privately educated students, had been taught it to the necessary standard.
    Today I have completed my PhD, and am co-writing a commentary on a Latin medical text for which there is no English translation, and I still live in the same suburb which was ridiculed by some of the private school educated people with whom I took my first Latin class at university. Attitudes put forward by sad excuses of human beings such as this disgust me. They run counter to my experiences and my accomplishments. People, such as this poor excuse for a human being, looking down on people who have worked very hard to get where they are especially annoy me when there is a damn good chance he only has the job which allows him to write such drivel because he wore the correct school tie to an interview.

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  2. After seeing your post in Classics International on Facebook, I read your reaction to James Delingpole's piece in *The Spectator*. Although I don't have first-hand knowledge of the British academy, I am completely inclined to agree with your riposte. I too worry about making classical studies even less accessible than they currently are.

    I admit that I was a bit taken aback, however, by your choice to include a photograph of Delingpole in a swimsuit, with the caption "Delingpole: Not much better Sixpack than Sense." I find this to be exactly the sort of body shaming that Mary Beard justly criticized when she was on the receiving end of such cruelty.

    Your argument against Delingpole's column struck me as sound. I don't think you need to stoop to ridiculing your opponent for his looks. Just imagine if a man had responded in a like manner to a women--pasting up a picture of her in a bathing suit, and making fun of her figure! I don't want to rub you the wrong way, but I was disappointed that you would do this. I hope you'll consider taking the photo down; your argument is stronger without it.

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  3. After seeing your post in Classics International on Facebook, I read your reaction to James Delingpole's piece in *The Spectator*. Although I don't have first-hand knowledge of the British academy, I am completely inclined to agree with your riposte. I too worry about making classical studies even less accessible than they currently are.

    I admit that I was a bit taken aback, however, by your choice to include a photograph of Delingpole in a swimsuit, with the caption "Delingpole: Not much better Sixpack than Sense." I find this to be exactly the sort of body shaming that Mary Beard justly criticized when she was on the receiving end of such cruelty.

    Your argument against Delingpole's column struck me as sound. I don't think you need to stoop to ridiculing your opponent for his looks. Just imagine if a man had responded in a like manner to a women--pasting up a picture of her in a bathing suit, and making fun of her figure! I don't want to rub you the wrong way, but I was disappointed that you would do this. I hope you'll consider taking the photo down; your argument is stronger without it.

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  4. I have rather ambivalent feelings about this issue. First, a declaration: I was educated in the sciences right up to and including university, and then decided to change careers and study Greek and Latin in my early twenties. I was 23 when I first saw the Greek alphabet - in its entirety, that is.

    This has undoubtedly harmed my ability to feel comfortable with the language in some ways. This is a matter of psychological 'fact' - the earlier you are exposed to a language, and the longer you practice it consistently, the more familiar you are with its forms and nuances. Furthermore, I have no objections with the celebration of excellence at an institutional level. If it is discovered - and these questions are amenable to empirical study - that classicists with exposure to classics at the age of 8 or 9 make invariable better classicists, then I have no philosophical objection to 'elite institutions' favouring the admission of such candidates. Indeed, this is precisely why initiatives of getting Classics into school - and I primarily mean Greek and Latin Grammar and Syntax - are so important: they level the socio-economical playing field.

    On the other hand, I believe that learning the languages when I was philosophically mature enough to appreciate exactly what I was learning, why it was important and beautiful, has also helped me in many ways.

    In truth the subject is a complex one and one which ought not to be tackled from an ideologically predefined position, particularly since it can (and has been) be studied empirically. Educational policy, whether admission criteria at Oxford or country-wide policies for primary school, should be primarily informed by such studies.

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