State education has outlawed difficulty
But private schools, private tutors and bestselling books are filling the vacuum, says Harry Mount. Larkin was right: there is a hunger in us all ‘to be more serious’
The decline of the British education system has been my gain, I’m only partly ashamed to confess. As somebody who has published a jokey book about a highbrow subject, I have profited from the proceeds of writing for a market that simply didn’t exist half a century ago.
In 1958, the sort of people who are buying books about Latin today were learning Latin in school. I’ve lost count of the people in their forties who’ve told me, ‘I never learnt Latin, but my parents did. I wish my children did, too.’
The desire to learn difficult things is always in us, as Philip Larkin said in ‘Church Going’ — ‘Someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious’. The problem is that schools and universities have increasingly failed to feed that hunger over the last half-century.
There are lots of reasons: the growing feeling that children shouldn’t be allowed to fail; a dislike of competition because of its supposed nastiness; an embarrassment that private and grammar schools have done better than state schools, leading to grade inflation and infantilised exams; and a hatred for old-fashioned, difficult subjects that are considered wickedly elite.
The various strands of this dastardly line of thought were neatly and idiotically woven together by the then education secretary, Charles Clarke, talking about classics a few years ago. ‘Education for its own sake is a bit dodgy,’ he said, ‘The idea that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right. Students need a relationship with the workplace.’
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would-be-hockey-mom
September 13th, 2008 9:47amThe anti-excellence attitude is present in the civil service as well as in the government. DFES, or whatever it is now called, is rife with it, and it will take a strong minded government indeed to root it out. Personally I am not sure that Cameron is up to it...
Teacher training is also a huge problem. Primary school teachers, for example, are taught not to correct spellings or grammar as a matter of routine because it might discourage and upset young children if their work is returned covered in corrections. I have had this explained to me, politely and apologetically, by a teacher at my children's primary school. I told her that my children were tough minded enough to take it. Incidentally I encountered the same teacher a couple of years later at the local grammar school where we were both waiting to collect our children from the 11-plus exam.
JohnAnt
September 14th, 2008 1:36amPeter Jones's 'Daily Telegraph' basic courses in Latin and Greek were both excellent. (Both are published as books.)
Multon
September 14th, 2008 11:36pmAre you suggesting that Queen's is some kind of state school and that your friend was only pulled up on his grammar when he entered Bar School? As far as I know it is a highly respectable academic institution and I think it's unlikely that he could have completed a degree there without some criticism of his grammar. I must say your own grammar leaves something to be deired. Several times you start sentences with a conjunction; on one occasion a paragraph. Take 50 lines, boy!
Madame X
September 16th, 2008 3:10amHere in America, there would be very few school teachers at this point CAPABLE of criticizing a child's grammar. I'm 50, and the serious study of grammar was on its way out in my day. A few simple grammar rules were repeated over and over in workbook form, but I never had to diagram sentences as my elder siblings had done. Needless to say, Greek was not even offered as a course, and Latin wasn't considered "useful" in comparison to Spanish or French so only a handful of people took it.
My parents got a better education than I did, even though they grew up in a more deprived area, and my children got a better education than I did because I sent them to private schools.
I had a similar experience to the one mentioned in the article -- I started at the university and quickly realized that my classmates who had attended parochial/private schools had had a much more intense, thorough, and systematic educational experience, even though I attended a highly-regarded state school. The teachers were well educated, but the curriculum was frivolous.
Arneson Stidgeley
September 16th, 2008 5:18pmJust give the parents the money per child that schools currently get.
"But children of feckless parents would suffer."
They suffer anyway and everyone else would be better off.