EDUCATION LANGUAGES
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I
am surprised to find myself – for the time being at least – a defender of independent schools. My mother was the head of a state primary school in Telford and I was brought up to be a passionate advocate of state education for all – even though I was sent to the
local direct grant school! Indeed, I continue to think that public schools provide a context for the entrenchment of social privilege for sheer snobbery. That is not always intentional, but it is an inevitable consequence of a division into fee- paying and non-fee-paying schools; schools for the rich and schools for the rest. They act to bolster some of the values that are worst about modern Britain. I am also sure that fee-paying
schools are not necessarily better than state schools. There are some educationally truly great public schools (and they are the ones we always have in mind). At the other end of the spectrum, there are also some fee-paying schools that charge ridiculous amounts of cash for a lousy education, little better than the dame schools of the 19th century. So why do I stick up for the
A left-wing professor defends public schools
Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, explains why she opposed the Intelligence Squared motion, ‘Public Schools are a Blight on British Society’
than 500 comprehensive schools in this country that offer any classical languages, mostly in what are euphemistically called ‘twilight’ classes. But I am not resting my case on classics, even though I happen to think that a society in which no one had direct access in the original language to Homer, Virgil, Euripides or Ovid would be grossly impoverished. I am more concerned with modern languages, with the tools of communication within Europe as well with the rest of the world, and with our entry to the shared cultural heritage of humanity, from Dante to the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the German Herta Müller. A penny-pinching, culture-averse state educational system is busy destroying the linguistic competence of this country. In 60 per cent of state schools,
independent sector? Quite simply, because of what I think it takes to produce the kind of society that we can be proud of. That means intellectual goods as well as economic ones; and it means a society in which we can still communicate with those outside our own shores in languages other than our own. It also means a society in which we still have direct access to the thousands of years of history of world culture that frame and enrich what we are as human beings. While we have a philistine government control, and an under-
“A penny-pinching, culture-averse state
educational system is busy destroying the
linguistic competence of this country”
funded state education system that reneges on its duty to equip our kids with the tools of access to culture, I have no option but to support the good independent schools and what they teach – even if only on a temporary basis. You might imagine that I have the decline of Latin and Greek in state schools in mind here, and in part I have. There are fewer
34 FIRST ELEVEN SUMMER 2010
fewer than half the pupils are studying any foreign language at age 14, compared to 18 per cent of private schools (and that includes the dame schools I was talking about and other special interest institutions). The entries for French GCSE fell by over 100,000 between 2004 and 2008, while German is approaching the level of Latin. So bad has it become, that one of the problems facing the 2012 Olympics is not finding enough medal winners but enough British translators for the games. This decline could be terminal.
Once we lose these cultural resources,
we don’t get them back. We cannot let Homer skip a generation or two and then learn how to read him again later when we have the cash. Our skills in these areas depend on a continuous tradition of learning, which is now being sustained – for all their other faults – by the public schools. Against the monolithic philistinism, the exam-obsessed curricula imposed by Whitehall (not to mention the still lousy pay given to young teachers), the public schools do offer a glimpse of an alternative. And it’s for this reason that I have to back them… even if my mother would be turning in her grave. %
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