Another Equally as Lamentable an Educational Loss
Civitas, 5 May 2009
This week sees the fiftieth anniversary of C.P.Snow’s famous ‘two cultures’ lecture. To mark the occasion, but even more importantly to draw attention to how even more poorly science is now being taught in the country’s schools, Civitas this week publishes an anthology edited by its deputy director Robert Whelan, entitled From Two Cultures to No Culture: C.P.Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture 50 years on. An edited version of Robert’s introduction appears in today’s Daily Telegraph.
Snow’s lecture acquired its fame largely on account of the fabulously vitriolic response it drew from F.R.Leavis.
In the lecture, Snow accused the country’s cultural elite of having deliberately cultivated a snobbish studied ignorance of science. Leavis returned the compliment by accusing Snow of Philistinism. The insult was doubtlessly intended to be all the more wounding since, although Snow trained as a scientist, by the time of his lecture he had acquired the reputation of being a novelist of some minor distinction.
I should like to use the anniversary and the publication of Robert’s anthology to dwell briefly on another change for the worse to have occurred to education in this country since the time Snow and Leavis crossed swords.
That change is the practical disappearance from all but the most elite schools of any teaching of ancient Greek civilisation.
Of course, for a long time, preoccupation with the teaching of classics helped delay the introduction of the teaching of the natural sciences into the country’s grammar schools and, even more so, its public schools. But those days are now long gone.
Today, all good schools teach science. However, Latin and Greek are seldom taught in any but the very best schools. The decline in the study of not so much those two languages themselves, but rather of the literatures originally written in them, in many ways, has been an educational loss every bit as deplorable as has been any recent decline in the quality of science teaching at school.
Of course, the country needs good scientists, and so it also needs good science teaching in schools. But it also needs just as much a suitably well-educated public who can bring to bear on the passing political and ethical issues of the day the perspective and balance that comes only from familiarity with the literature of classical Greece and Rome, especially that of Athens during the golden fifth and fourth centuries BCE.
The national loss to which the end of widespread acquaintance with that literature would lead was something about which the fabled headmaster of Rugby, Thomas Arnold, wrote the following in 1834. What he wrote bears dwelling on as we reflect on the lamentable state to which science education has been reduced in this country over the course of the last half century. Arnold wrote:
‘When Latin and Greek were almost the only written languages of civilised man, it is manifest that they must have furnished the subjects of all liberal education. The question [of the present value of their study] therefore is wholly is changed, since the growth of a complete literature in other languages; since France, and Italy, and Germany, and England, have each produced their philosophers, their poets and their historians, worthy to be placed on the same level with those of Greece and Rome
‘But although there is not the same reason now which existed three or four centuries ago for the study of Greek and Roman literature, yet there is another no less substantial Expel Greek and Latin from your schools, and you confine the views of the existing generations to themselves and their immediate predecessors: you will cut off so many centuries of the world’s experience, and place us in the same state as if the human race had first come into existence in the year 1500. For it is nothing to say that a few learned individuals might still study classical literature; the effect produced on the public mind would be no greater than that which has resulted from the labours of our Oriental scholars; it would not spread beyond themselves, and men in a few generations would know as little of Greece and Rome as they do actually of China and Hindustan. But such ignorance would be incalculably more to be regretted. With the Asiatic mind we have no nearer connection or sympathy than that which is derived from our common humanity. But the mind of the Greek and of the Roman is in all essential points of its constitution our own; and not only so, but is our own mind developed to an extraordinary degree of perfection…
[A]lthough the Greeks and Romans had no steam-engines, no printing-presses, no mariner’s compass, no telescopes, no microscopes, no gunpowder; yet in our moral and political views, in those matters which most determine human character, there is a perfect resemblance in these respects. Aristotle, and Plato, and Thucydides, and Cicero, and Tacitus, are most untruly called ancient writers; they are virtually our own countrymen and contemporaries, but have the advantage which is enjoyed by intelligent travellers, that their observation has been exercised in a field out of the reach of common men; and that having thus seen in a manner with our eyes what we cannot see for ourselves, their conclusions are such as bear upon our circumstances, while their information has all the charm of novelty, and all the value of a mass of new and pertinent facts, illustrative of the great science of the nature of civilised man…’ [Thomas Arnold, ‘Rugby School – Use of the Classics’, Journal of Education, 1834, in J.F.Findlay, Arnold of Rugby: His School Life and Contributions to Education (Cambridge: University Press, 1925)]
As I look back over what is now fast approaching the end of my working career of which nearly all I have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to have spent in the field of education, depending on your point of view, I believe I can say I never learned anything of greater subsequent personal value and inspiration than what I gained, not from the study of Latin — for I was never much good at languages, but from the brief introduction I received at university to ancient Greek philosophy.
Without some acquaintance with some of the major authors of classical antiquity, albeit perhaps only in translation, a person will always remain bereft of a liberal education, no matter to how much science, history or English literature he or she may have been exposed at school or university.
Athens has been the schoolhouse of the world for two and a half millennia. Those who have not yet attended it but who would like to do so can enrol by paying a quick visit to their local book-store or toAmazon. There, courtesy of the writings of Plato, they will be able to take a seat next to Socrates and listen to him idle away his days playfully educating his fellow Athenians… and anyone else who will but read what Plato makes his former teacher say.