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. Speaking to a cross-section of one pupil currently studying the A Level (my son), I find that it is much liked because it offers what he calls ‘real history’ — the chance to get to grips with the actual sources. In some cases, the origins of Athenian democracy, for example, the sources are so few that the pupil can study everything — e.g. the relevant aside in Herodotus about how Cleisthenes, in 508 or 507 bc, ‘joined the people [demos] to the company of his followers’ — known to scholarship. The Renaissance was so called because the study of the classical world was reborn (grammar schools were one result, being designed for the study of Latin, not English, grammar). We need a word for the opposite — the steady removal of that study from any serious place in our culture. The Remort?

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page