Both friends and colleagues have asked for my thoughts on the initiative to reintroduce Latin at GCSE. I’ll be honest, at first, I thought it was a joke. Knowing how difficult it can be to engage young people in learning modern foreign languages, the idea that you could motivate teenagers to learn Latin with the carrot being “you can be like Boris Johnson” seemed laughable.
There’s some crossover in the ideology that all subjects should be accessible to all students with the idea of cultural capital (a new Ofsted fave). Isn’t it strange, however, that it seems to always be focused on state school students learning things that private school students are presumed to already know? Why aren’t privately educated students taken on trips to sticky-floored metal gigs or non-league football? Why aren’t they asked to do a Btec in refrigeration to “widen their horizons”?
In FE, I doubt that GCSE Latin will become an offered subject, simply because we are uniquely placed to get students onto their next step in their progression to HE or a career. Try as I might, I could find no current courses on the Ucas website that required GCSE Latin, simply a proven ability in language learning, which you could get from French or Spanish (with the added bonus of being able to ask for the bill on holiday).
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I have had a great number of students who have wanted to learn ancient history, and speak warmly of their favourite lessons in school being about ancient cultures. However the current GCSE history specs seem to skirt anything outside the Romans and the Greeks; no Aztecs, no Egyptians, no Mayans, no Incans, no Persians. I’d argue that learning GCSE Latin in order to understand better the Roman influence on Britain only makes the subject more parochial. And if the idea is to give students “a grounding in the European languages”, in the words of Eddie Izzard: why not just learn the European languages?
My students love Duolingo and learning other languages and do it in their own time. One is learning Korean to better understand the lyrics of K-Pop, one is learning Japanese because he wants to live there. One is learning Klingon for unknown reasons. I am currently learning Welsh because it’s a language of the United Kingdom. None of us really sees this language learning as a marketable skill that will lead to higher education, we’re learning these languages because of curiosity and a need to communicate. British Sign Language courses are hugely popular at our college - would that not be a better use of students’ time? Even Klingon is a living language; recently added words to the Klingon lexicon are aSralya (Australia) and raS De’wI (desktop computer).
The move to push GCSE Latin as a gateway to studying ancient history and Classics also flies in the face of the government’s focus on vocational and Stem subjects over the last decade. Aston and London South Bank universities announced that they were closing their history programmes as recently as May because of falling numbers, so what’s the long game for universities? Hoping that being forced to study Latin at GCSE will make wannabe historians out of a generation? It didn’t work for my parents, who were both forced to learn Latin, and hated it, but still cultivated a real interest in history, - despite Latin rather than because of it.
My home town’s Latin motto is Industria Navem Implet, which means “industry fills the ships”. To me, this means that trades are what fuel the economy and therefore the country. It says that while we are a small former industrial town, we’re part of something bigger, and we can be proud of that.
You don’t need to learn Latin to see where the issue with elitism lies. Of the three educational institutions which Gavin Williamson attended, none had a Latin motto. Even his alma mater, the University of Bradford, chooses Shakespeare: “Give invention light”, from his Sonnet 38. Maybe instead of foisting Latin on a generation of state school students, language learning should be funded as an extracurricular activity as well as a core subject. I await my call up to teach at Klingon Club.
