IN DEFENSE OF LATIN: Here's a Scotsman editorial decrying the barbaric decision to eliminate the one remaining vocational course for classics teachers in Scotland and explaining why the decision is, well, barbaric. Lege totum et lacrima.

Latin joins procession to the cultural graveyard

Gerald Warner

EHEU! O me miserum! And all that sort of thing. The announcement that Strathclyde University is to abolish its vocational course for classics teachers has been greeted with an outbreak of lamentations of the kind that the Scottish establishment does so well, whenever some cultural asset that it has sedulously neglected for decades is finally pronounced to be in a terminal condition. For centuries, Latin and Greek were the mainstays of Scottish education; if they are lost to the schools curriculum (NB Latin noun, neuter, second declension), that will not be a sign of modernisation, but of grave intellectual decline.

This crisis is hardly unexpected. Greek became a fatality in Scottish state schools decades ago; now Latin is on the danger list. Yet the complacency with which the educational establishment has watched this decline is matched only by the fatuity of the comments with which it has responded to the announcement by Strathclyde. While rightly deploring the demise of classics, Judith Gillespie, of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, claimed: "These subjects are not seen as having market value. This is the market economy in action."

La Gillespie is talking nonsense (so, no change there). There is no free market in Scottish state education, which is where the collapse in classics is taking place. It is in the free-market sector of the independent schools that Latin and Greek are relatively flourishing. In the academic year 2000- 2001, official figures show that, of pupils presenting for examinations at SCQF Levels 3, 4 and 5, although only 3.8% came from independent schools, they supplied 37.2% of entries for Latin. The market is no enemy of the classics; it is in the state school sector, manipulated by social engineers, Utopians and fanatics for �inclusion�, that rigorous disciplines such as Latin and Greek are sidelined as ��litist�.

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Today, millions are flocking to see Mel Gibson�s Passion, whose dialogue is in Latin and Aramaic. Perhaps that will help. At the most trivial level, it is alleged that the Harry Potter phenomenon, with its many Latin allusions, has caused the 80% increase in American school pupils taking Latin for college credits over the past six years. The publication, in Latin, of Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis may intensify this trend. In Scotland, however, the growing lack of provision makes pupils� interest irrelevant. O tempora, O mores!