The glory of the Cameron government is all Latin to me

One of the glorious triumphs of the present British government is the introduction of so-called free schools.

These schools are free in the sense that we all pay for them out of taxes. They are free in the sense that they are not under local government control which means they don’t have to follow policies chosen by elected representatives or be guided by the general interests of the community to which they belong, or at least in which they reside. And they are free in the sense that their educational principles can be dictated by a small group of self-appointed experts on education.

One of the most outspoken supporters of free schools is a journalist called Toby Young who has become chair of governors at one of the first free schools opened. One of the handful, I might say, since schools have not been flocking to his banner as he rather suggested they might, before the last election.

An aspect of his school that has attracted particular attention is that it has made Latin a compulsory subject. Many argue that studying Latin will open children to the roots of our culture, presumably on the basis that reading Virgil will be easier and more stimulating to bored teenagers than reading Shakespeare or Dickens or, come to that, even Graham Greene.

They also suggest that a knowledge of Latin comes in handy when studying modern Romance languages. I’ve learned three of them, and I leave it to you to guess how invaluable I found it to know the behaviour of a deponent verb in Latin when I came to grapple with Italian, French and Spanish, none of which has such verbs. Or declensions. Or ablative absolutes. Or most of the conjugated forms. Or the ludicrous habit of sticking the verb pretty much anywhere in a sentence, often apparently at random.

I studied Latin for years and years. Five years at school. A couple of years as an optional subject at university. It left me in a particularly frustrating half-way house of understanding: when I came to do research on science in the eighteenth-century, a time when much of the material was still written in Latin, I had just enough mastery of the language to know what the writer was talking about, but not enough to know what he was saying about it. He was, say, talking about what happened to kinetic energy in collisions between elastic bodies, but was he saying it was conserved or that it wasn’t?

Blowed if I could tell. Very exasperating. If only they’d just written their own language, it would have spared me a great deal of pain.

Not that I think that a knowledge of Latin is completely without value. No. There came the day when we were introduced to the poetry of Catullus, for instance. Far beyond our power to understand, but what the heck, with a lot of help we managed to struggle through his short elegy 101.

What was it about? He’d travelled out from Rome to grieve for his dead brother. Standing there before the ‘mute ashes’ he pays his last respects, going through the conventional motions expected of a man at a funeral, presenting grave gifts wet with his tears.

Catullus, whose sorrow for the loss of his brother echoed down the ages.
At least as far as me.

And then came closing words that I found truly searing. At least once they’d been translated for me:

‘Atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale’

‘And for evermore, brother, hail and farewell.’

There’s a deeply moving pathos to that long, forlorn goodbye, echoing down all eternity.

Worth seven years of study? Perhaps if that’s your choice, as it was mine. Worth investing public money in the compulsion of unwilling spotty fourteen-year olds? I doubt it.

But I hope before long we’ll be able to wish ‘ave atque vale’ to the government that came up with the idea. In perpetuum.




Postscript. People have pointed out to me that I tend to take a partisan line in some of these posts and don’t give the present British government credit for its achievements. 

To set the record straight and to re-establish my reputation for political balance, here is a full list of the most notable successes of that government so far:

Feline conduct, Free Schools and the Football League

When a tomcat arrives in a new territory, he walks round and sprays the boundary. The result probably smells familiar and comfortable to him, though to the rest of us it’s pretty vile.

New governments behave in the same way. In their case, they mark their authority with a series of bright new initiatives establishing how innovative and clever they are. Our nice new government here in Britain has come up with several of these, one of which is the introduction of ‘free schools’.

Depending on your point of view, these are schools that are being freed from the dead hand of bureaucracy applied by local government, to be run instead by groups who really care about education, like parents or teachers. Alternatively, they’re schools that are being removed from the control of elected local representatives working for the good of the entire community, and handed over to groups of individuals answerable to no-one and working to their own agendas.

Interesting the effect of including or excluding the word 'elected', isn't it?

The reality is that the free schools will be both of those things, but which you choose to emphasise marks pretty clearly where you stand in the political spectrum.

Now the most fascinating recent development on this front has been the announcement that the English Football League wants to run a number of these schools. It's my firm aim to avoid cynicism, so don't expect any cheap crack from me about the remedial effect that going back to school might have on the level of intellectual attainment of some of our footballers.

No, the League is thinking of running schools in which tomorrow’s footballers would be trained. Again, I’m not going to pass comment on whether there is anything to be done for today’s. Instead let’s concentrate on the central question of whether the Football League is a fit organisation to run schools at all.

I’ve thought about this deeply. It occurs to me that it is an inescapable fact of our schools today that they measure children against fixed standards. Some will succeed, some will fail. Inevitably therefore success and failure – the same impostor, as Kipling wrote – are built into the fabric of our schools.

As the England football team in South Africa recently showed, the League is clearly well acquainted with one of those two terrible alternatives. Who knows: they may be dimly aware of what the other one feels like. So maybe they have what it takes to run schools.

Whether the outcome of all this will be fragrant or pungent has yet to be seen. It will probably depend on our individual point of view in any case: are we tomcats invigorated by the scent of spray or are we exasperated pet owners deciding that it may be time to cut someone’s balls off?

Government magic

The key skill of the conjuror is sleight of hand. There's a brilliant trick being carried off by leading politicians in a number of countries at the moment, which consists of taking hold of widely-held views, often directed against politicians, and skilfully turning them to their advantage.

A curious trait of our democracies is that though we choose our governments, we loathe them as soon as they’re elected. By getting into office, any politician becomes at a stroke a lying, cheating snake who’s just like all the others. They get worse and worse until they’re finally forced out of public life, to general relief.

At that point a strange process of rehabilitation often gets under way. There are exceptions, of course: it’ll be a while before anyone starts to think any better of Tony Blair, for instance. But with most politicians, once they’re out of office, people begin to warm to them again. Jimmy Carter was one of the most reviled politicians in the West, defeated for a second term by a third-rate former Hollywood actor who was probably already suffering from the Alzheimer’s that later killed him. Thirty years on, Carter has attained a status little short of sainthood.

In part, the dislike of government takes the form of a desire to see more power exercised locally. The trouble is that we dislike local politicians even more than national ones. Who are they to strut around making themselves important when we know that all they’ve done is get elected to a job no more than a handful of people would consider worth doing in the first place?

Now national politicians, aware of our distrust of all politicians, and our particular dislike of local ones, have started to turn these feelings to their advantage.

In Britain, for instance, our smart new government has set up an ‘Office for Budget Responsibility’. This is staffed by economists, not politicians, and will make forecasts about future trends in the economy and rule on the advisability of financial measures proposed by government.

Fascinating isn’t it? We spent centuries wresting the power to tax from the unelected busybodies surrounding the king. Why, it was because Charles I was trying to raise taxes for a foreign war that we rose against him and sent him to the scaffold. When our colonists in North America in turn rose against us their war cry was ‘no taxation without representation’. Yet now we want to hand over financial control to a bunch of unelected so-called experts.

And what sort of experts are they? Economists. Please tell me that I’m not alone in seeing an irony here. As J K Galbraith, an economist himself, pointed out, the role of economists is to make astrologers look good. On the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England in the run up to the financial crash, only one of the nine experts called for reductions in the interest rate; seven voted to leave them unchanged for month after month; there was even one who called for them to be raised. It turns out that David Blanchflower, the lone advocate for a reduction, was the one who got it right. Eight out of nine got it wrong. Again and again.

Now we’re supposed to put our faith in experts like them?

But the real beauty of the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility is the way it plays to the distrust of politicians in general while strengthening the hands of those politicians who happen to be in power. As ‘experts’, economists have an aura of authority which politicians don’t. This has been used to the benefit of the very politicians that make up the government: last week figures worked out by the Office for Budget Responsibility and showing that the impact of the government's economic policy on unemployment was, unsurprisingly, going to be catastrophic, were leaked to The Guardian. That proved embarrassing for the government. No problem: the Office rushed out some new predictions that ‘corrected’ the earlier ones. One might quibble that they were based on forecasts for private sector growth that most commentators think are wildly optimistic. But hey, they’re a lot more comfortable for the government, and they have the authority of having been produced by ‘independent experts’.

The other wonderful initiative in England is called ‘Free schools’. This is equally clever in the way that it plays simultaneously on the desire for local control and the dislike of local politicians.

Obviously, no school can be free, they all cost money. They'll be free to parents, of course, though not free to society: like any state school, these ones will be paid for by all of us, through our taxes. The freedom of their name, though, will lie in the fact that the parents will run them, allowing them to avoid the supposedly bureaucratic control of local authorities.

One of the most outspoken supporters of this plan is a character called Toby Young. He puts together a smartly constructed justification for why we should all fund a school he can run himself for his own kids, whatever impact that may have on any coherent educational strategy his local authority may be pursuing for children in his neighbourhood generally.

Young seems to be aspiring to be the thinking Englishman’s equivalent of what Sarah Palin is in the United States. I say ‘thinking’ because he's good at writing, if you have the stomach for his particular brand of Fox News-style ultra-right wing diatribe, and when Palin was questioned about what papers she consulted, she made it clear that she hadn’t even fully mastered reading yet. On the other hand, having heard Young in public argument, I’m not convinced he has her open-mindedness or her sensitivity to nuance. At one point he told an opponent ‘I don’t want to get personal’. Why do people say that kind of thing? Everyone knows there’s a ‘but’ coming, followed by a personal attack. Since no-one was forcing him to make it, he must clearly have wanted to.

In any case, since they take public money, the schools will be subject to the usual checks on their administration and their standards. If local authorities don’t do the monitoring, who will? You got it. Central government. So a degree of authority and the funding for these schools will have been switched from local to national control, and all in the name of local autonomy.

See what I mean about conjuring? Pick a card, pick any card, but whichever it is, the government wins. And there are even clever, articulate people like Toby Young who'll give a veneer of plausibility to the deception.

And just like any magic act, it ultimately only works because of our willingness to let ourselves be duped.

Ah, well. Hamlet got it about right: ‘what a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.’