Which made me sad to read this story in Schools Week:
Thousands of secondary pupils are facing "significant disruption" after the government scrapped its state school Latin programme mid-year as it seeks to plug a fiscal black hole.
In a letter seen by Schools Week, the Department for Education has informed schools it is terminating its Latin Excellence Programme in February.
The £4 million scheme was supposed to run until 2026, but government has enacted a break clause to end it earlier. The scheme provided a centre of excellence to create resources for partner schools, and also funded teacher salaries and trips to Rome.
Money is tight, but having read recently that the proposed GCSE in natural history is on hold because it's seen as a Tory initiative,* I suspect a combination of inverse snobbery and Gradgrindery is at work here too.
For myself, and perhaps because we received so little formal grammar teaching in English in those days, I found studying Latin invaluable because it taught me how languages work. That was about the most useful knowledge I brought to studying philosophy at university, though those staples of primary school maths, Venn diagrams, proved to he useful in proving the validity or not of syllogisms.
A few weeks ago, Liberal Democrat MPs were posting about their belief in choice in education as a way of justifying their opposition to VAT on school fees. If choice is good for those who can afford private education, then it is good for everyone.
So I hope to see them posting in favour of giving state schools the freedom to offer a diverse curriculum - including natural history and Latin.
* Mary Colwell once wrote a guest post for this blog making the case for this qualification, The idea that natural history is somehow Tory reminds me that George Orwell began one of his As I Please columns in Tribune: "Last time I mentioned flowers in this column an indignant lady wrote in to say that flowers are bourgeois."
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