It's a Don's Life (3 page)

Is Latin too hard?

28 June 2006

Research at Durham University claims to show kids are put off taking Latin GCSE because it is too hard – about a grade harder
than other supposedly ‘hard’ subjects. That is to say, if you can get a grade C at Latin, you’d be in the running for a B
in Physics or German. And teachers, it’s said, have too much of an eye on the league tables to persuade their pupils to take
the risk.

At least this is a change from the usual story about Latin. More than a third of all takers get the top A* grade (compared
with less than 4% in Business Studies and around 6% in German – or, going the other way, 55% in Greek). And 60% in Latin get
A* and A combined. How easy it must be, some wonder.

Actually, these stories are easily compatible. Latin is an extremely self-selecting subject, chosen by some of our very brightest
kids. No wonder they do extremely well – and, as I see when they apply to us, often get a string of other very high grades.
The question is, should Latin be the subject of choice for the less bright, too?

People – we classicists included – sometimes get in a muddle here. There is no question at all that Latin and Greek should
be available to the talented of whatever wealth and class. The erosion of Classics in the maintained sector is a disgrace
in Britain and elsewhere. But is it actually a sensible educational goal to try to spread Latin and Greek right across the
ability range?

There’s a baby-and-bathwater problem here. At the moment Latin and Greek are the only foreign language GCSEs where you still
read some literature in the original language. Thank heavens that OCR, the only exam board now offering classical languages,
has valiantly kept on the ‘set books’, so some 16-year-olds still get more than a taste of real Virgil, Catullus or Homer.
Sure, it’s difficult – but interesting, too, and it’s keeping some of our brightest-and-best engaged and on-message. You could
notch it all down a level, but only at a cost. A simplified GCSE (with simplified Virgil) would not offer the same stimulus
at all.

But there is in fact a bigger point here. What do we think that studying any of these subjects at GSCE is FOR? In modern languages,
the repetitive, multiple-choice tests on how to find the cathedral from the car park, or how to order a pizza in Bologna are
mind-numbing for the bright; but they do fulfil a function. Anyone might need to order a meal or ask directions in a foreign
city. If GCSE promotes that skill, so much the better – despite the doomladen prophets of dumbing down.

And that’s what’s going to kill the subject.

Comments

Latin is anything but a ‘dead language’. For several decades Finnish radio has been broadcasting the news in Latin. They have
even recorded Elvis Presley songs in the language.

So you see, Tacitus rides on ... the airwaves. Just tune in and listen and learn.

PETER ATHEY

Does Latin ‘train the brain’?

10 July 2006

There are several reasons often touted that seem to me wide of the mark. (Sorry – a typically academic way to kick off; but
these do have to be disposed of first.)

You do NOT learn Latin because it helps you to understand the spells in Harry Potter, or to read the slogans on pound coins.
That may be a side benefit, but frankly you’re not missing much in life if you don’t get all of Harry’s wizardry.

You do NOT learn Latin because it helps you learn other languages. Again that may be a knock-on effect. But if you want to
learn (say) Spanish, it’s better to get on with it, not learn Latin first to make it easier. (Besides, I always feel that
any subject that tries to justify itself by claiming that it helps you learn something else is on the way out.)

No, you learn Latin because of what was written in it – and because of the direct access that Latin gives you to a literary
tradition that lies at the very heart (not just at the root) of Western culture.

But more than that, the Latin classics are so embedded in the Western literary tradition that as a culture (I’m not necessarily
talking about individual readers here) we would be lost in our own world if we could not access them. What would we make of
Dante or Milton, for example, if we could not read them side by side with Virgil? (For that matter, I’m always amazed that
modern historians seem happy to work on figures such as Gladstone when they don’t know a word of the classical languages that
were his daily bread and butter.)

Won’t translations do? Up to a point, yes. And let’s be honest, most people in this country for the last 500 years or so have
consumed their Latin literature in the vernacular. Like it or not, Latin has always been an élite subject. But translations
aren’t a complete substitute, for two reasons.

First, if we let Latin drop entirely, who is going to be able to understand all the ‘new’ Latin that continues to be discovered
by the page, if not the volume-f – much of it (like the Vindolanda letters) from Britain? Or are we going to keep a handful
of boffins on the job, translating the new stuff as it appears?

Ask a silly question

13 July 2006

Last week I spent a morning doing ‘media training’, a marvellous crash course that the university occasionally lays on for
its staff. The idea is to make you a more ‘effective communicator’ on radio and television.

About half the morning was theory (what to wear, how to prepare, when and how to smile, etc.). The other half was practical,
and took the form of some recorded interviews, which you then went over – and picked to pieces – with instructors and fellow
victims. It was humiliating, but extraordinarily helpful. ‘Where’s your killer point?’ the instructor asked after we’d listened
to me discussing the benefits of Latin. A fair cop, I thought. There wasn’t one.

I don’t imagine that I shall be following all the rules we were given. Honestly, I can’t see me in the recommended pastel
colours and trim jackets, even if they are flattering in front of the camera. But, at the very least, it’s nice to know what
the rules are that you’re breaking.

Overall, the main point seemed to be that you would do a better media interview once you had learned how to ‘set the agenda’.
Roughly translated this means ‘how not to answer the question’.

Academics, it seems, are very bad at not answering the question. A big part of our day job involves explaining to students
why ‘irrelevance will be penalised’ (as is blazoned across many Cambridge exam papers) and trying to convince the younger
generation that academic success usually goes to those who answer the question that is set – not the question they would like
to have been asked.

The result is that your average don will obediently wrestle with even the stupidest questions posed by the most ill-informed
interviewers, while the minutes for moving on to more interesting territory tick speedily away. I’ve often enough gone down
the primrose path of ‘So what kind of dog breeds did the Romans have, then ... ?’ (search me – nasty ones, I think), when
we should have been discussing the intriguing power of ancient mythical monsters.

It was good to learn some tactics for dealing with this. And ever since I’ve been practising in my head phrases like ‘That’s
an interesting question, but I think the really important point is ...’ or ‘Yes, but we first need to think about ...’

I fear, once more, that I broke several of the rules. Where was the jacket? And alcohol (a predictable no-no) had been consumed
in sufficient quantities at a party the night before that the killer points didn’t come easy. But perhaps I have managed to
correct that distracting little slant of the head. I can hardly wait to watch.

What are academics for?

18 July 2006

Because we have very few fixed hours of work, university teachers are often assumed to have loads of free time. People see
us taking retail therapy on a Tuesday morning or having a long lunch, and they tend to forget that all our weekend and most
of the night was spent in the library. Not great for family life, as most partners of academics complain.

This makes us easy prey to all kinds of demands from those who think that we can easily give some of that ‘free time’ to them.
There are scores of ‘independent television makers’ who will ring you up and try to get you to plan their new programme on
gladiators, sex in the ancient world, the fall of the Roman empire, or whatever, over the phone. Now that email is the standard
medium of communication, we’ve got out of practice at the old art of putting the receiver down – which is, of course, why
they ring.

Then there are the eager sixth-formers who think that an enthusiastic letter or email will prompt you to give them more help
with their A level course work than you should by rights offer. As I can testify, there are more kids in this country working
on ‘Roman Women’ than you could possibly believe.

It is presumably in response to this kind of pressure that a senior Oxford academic has published on the web his, punningly
titled, ‘Rules of Engagement’, for anyone wanting to use his services.

These rules consist mostly of a list of things he won’t do:

But there are other canny conditions laid down:

I can see where he is coming from. I still get angry about some universities abroad who have taken more than six months to
refund my travel expenses. And certainly there have been times when rearranging my university teaching, taking a cold and
uncomfortable train journey cross-country and then talking to a handful of conscripts in a village hall has not quite seemed
worth the trouble it has caused.

But what has happened to the idea of public responsibility? The fact that academics get paid (albeit inadequately) by the
state surely gives them a duty to the community more widely. It may not be part of our contracts, but it is certainly part
of how most of us understand the job in its widest sense, to spread our word outside the academy. Draughty church halls, lectures
in unglamorous locations with no travel expenses (prisons are one of my particular favourites), short reviews in local papers
all have their place on the agenda.

Most important of all are the talks to schools (strikingly absent from the ‘Rules of Engagement’). True, these are not lucrative
and they aren’t always exactly fun. It isn’t easy for the untrained to hold the attention of 60 or so 14-year-olds, especially
when half the audience has been dragooned into your talk to give their exhausted teacher an hour off. But somewhere in there,
just occasionally, is someone whose horizons you might change.

The husband, now an art historian, recounts just such an eye-opening moment from his own school days. He had never thought
of art history as a subject you might actually study, until Nikolaus Pevsner came to his school and gave a still-remembered
talk on local buildings, and – in particular – on the different architectural histories of the towns of Bristol and Bath.
Cliché as it must seem, it was the start of another art-historical career.

Pevsner was already a well-established figure at that point. But I rather doubt that he laid down careful conditions about
his travel expenses and his credit card bill.