The Classics and the Culture War

By Sean Gabb, a teacher of Latin and classical Greek

The Classics Faculty at the University of Oxford is considering whether to remove from its undergraduate courses the compulsory study in their original languages of Homer and Vergil. The reasons given are that students from independent schools, where some classical teaching is kept up, tend at the moment to do better in examinations than students from state schools, and that men do better than women. I regard this as the most important news of the week. I do so partly because I make some of my living from these languages, and so have a financial interest in their survival. I do so mainly because I see the proposal as a further enemy advance in the Culture War through which we have been living for at least the past two generations.

I could make this essay into another attack on the cultural leftists. I will come to these, as they are among the villains. They are not, however, the main villains. These are people who sometimes regard themselves, and are generally regarded by others, as conservatives. They once looked to Margaret Thatcher as their political champion, and then to Tony Blair. They were some of the most committed advocates of our departure from the European Union. They now look to the Johnson Government for the final triumph of their agenda. For these people, a nation is barely more than a giant economic enterprise – Great Britain plc. For them, the main, or perhaps the sole, purpose of education is to provide sets of skills that have measurable value in a corporatised market.

These people have been around for a long time. They were satirised by Charles Dickens in Hard Times, where Thomas Gradgrind explains his philosophy of education:

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which to bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!”

In my own lifetime, they have risen to a position of shared dominance in education with the cultural leftists. Sometimes, like Gradgrind, they worship simply at the altar of “Facts.” Often they join this with an analysis, taken at first or second hand, from the writings of men like Martin Wiener and Corelli Barnett. Briefly summarised, their view of English history is one of avoidable decline since our mid-Victorian peak because of a ruling class obsession with the humanities in general and with the classics in particular. They look at American business schools and German science departments, and contrast these with a public school system focussed on the ancient languages. Looking at the Colonial Service examination for 1870, Barnett is outraged that

[P]ossible marks for Greek or Roman studies were twice the totals for French or German studies or political economy – and taken together, a third more than allotted to the entire field of science.

Their chance came in the 1980s, when the Thatcher Government tried to remake education as a kind of factory for the production of skills. Because they had to share dominance with the cultural leftists, they got less than they wanted – far less, indeed, than their leftist competitors whine that they did. Even so, they got a National Curriculum heavy with science and business teaching, and a new culture of inspections and testing and ranking. There was no room in this for the classics, and a gentle decline in the teaching of Greek and Latin since the Great War became a sudden collapse. I once knew a very decent Latin teacher who was made redundant in 1986 and ended his career as a court usher.

I agree that state education had become a joke where almost nothing of any kind was taught. As continued by Tony Blair, the Thatcher reforms did eventually drive up standards of literacy and numeracy. But this has been at a terrible cost. Any modern school that wants to be thought desirable must focus on its place in the league tables. This involves working the children like slaves – stuffing them in class with facts that can be regurgitated in tests and therefore graded, then handing out reams of homework that leaves no time for personal development.

The universities continue this conveyor belt approach. Around half of school leavers are pressured into “higher” education. Those who go into the “STEM” subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics – follow a narrow and specialised curriculum that leaves them ignorant of nearly everything outside their own subject. The rest sign up for largely worthless subjects – anything with the words “business” or “studies” in the name. There, they are kept busy with three-hour lectures. I know the value of these, as I used to give them. I fell asleep in one of them, and the students were happy when my voice finally trailed off. Progress in these subjects is measured by coursework that is increasingly plagiarised or ghost-written, or through examinations where the grades are fiddled. At the end of this, graduates – and everyone does graduate – are qualified for nothing better than employment in one of those bureaucracies of management or control that fasten on the actually productive like mistletoe on a tree. The universities look at rising numbers and the fact that graduates do find paid employment, and call this a great success. No one thinks it a disgrace if students never take up a book not on their worthless reading list, or that, having graduated, they never open another book.

Or school leavers at the bottom end are herded into courses in plumbing or hairdressing. I was once invited to teach a module in a Parking Studies degree – this for the certification of traffic wardens. I suppose people are needed to keep the roads clear, and I suppose they should be given some idea of their legal rights and duties. I am not at all sure if they need to have degrees. I am sure that skilled trades of undoubted value are best taught, as they always used to be, through private apprenticeships or informally on the job.

The overall result has been the death of education was it was traditionally conceived. The cultivation of intellect and a heightened power of discrimination cannot be measured and listed in a spreadsheet. So they are laughed at. Students are seen as slacking if their names are not marked on a register for every hour of a working day. It is not, I grant, the sort of education that Thomas Gradgrind promoted. At least the “facts” he worshipped were of some use. Nor would Martin Weiner or Corelli Barnett see it as promoting any kind of national revival. But it is the kind of education they helped bring about. Education has become a business awash with our tax money. Those who run it and those who direct the flows of money are at one in their focus on the lowest common denominator in terms of measurable outcomes. They are at one in their contempt for the classics. Removing the study of the finest Greek and Roman literature in their original languages is a step towards the abolition of the despised subjects themselves.

I turn now to the cultural leftists. I could write a polemic here about their hatred of Western civilisation as the cause of all victimhood. But this has become a standard argument in my part of the political spectrum, and I see no reason for adding to the complaints. What I will say instead is that the cultural leftists are generally lazy or stupid or both. Even if they are sometimes capable of it, they avoid arguments that involve careful reasoning from evidence. Their preferred mode of argument is a kind of verbal trickery, based on words loosely defined and protected from criticism by accusations of racial or sexual prejudice. They employ and promote each other according to proficiency in these low skills, and, of course, on connections. Therefore, they must colonise a new subject rather as a spider injects venom into a trapped fly. Before they can absorb a subject, they must first dissolve everything hard in it. They have been largely kept out of the STEM subjects because these are irreducibly hard. They involve very elaborate processes of reasoning and memory. If you want to build a DNA computer, or land a probe on Mars, you need to give years of study to the relevant subjects. Calling the rules of arithmetic a colonialist discourse may get you a PhD from somewhere, but will not let you take over a genuine research project.

The humanities have been an easier target. The study of English Literature has become a notorious joke. It has been steadily taken over by semi-literate women and girlie-men churning out tracts on lesbian subtextuality in the works of Jane Austin. The first generation of these people found that old fiction is easy to read, and that selective reading can generate almost any meaning. The present generation largely confines itself to reading the tracts already written, and recycling the quotes already mined. No one who studies a degree in English Literature ends with any appreciation of the English classics, nor, it seems, with the ability to write coherent prose. The main skills acquired are a jealously of excellence and the ability to take offence without warning. Sadly, these are marketable skills in the world as it now is. But no aeroplanes crash on take-off. No computer hardware fails to work as anticipated. A subject is ruined. But there are no measurable consequences. Those running it continue to praise each other’s brilliance. Unless you try reading them, the ruin is not plain.

The civilisation of the Ancient World is an obvious target for colonisation. It has great prestige. Despite some contribution by traditional Marxists – contributions that, even when wrong, are based on a full reading of the sources – it remains largely untouched by the cultural leftists. Their problem so far has been that, if you want to write up Roman Britain as a multi-racial paradise, or to pontificate about gender fluidity in the works of Aeschylus, you will not be taken seriously before you have mastered things like the rules of secondary sequence or those wicked strong aorists. Greek and Latin are not that hard to learn if your native language is English. They are easier than languages like Arabic and Japanese. But they do require hard work – which, I repeat, is something unattractive to the average cultural leftist.

The answer is to reduce the number of classicists fluent in the classical languages, until they can be pushed into a ghetto of necessary but otherwise ignored specialists. The result will be a subject studied wholly through English translations. The result of that will be a vast flowering of the usual semi-literate drivel and “equal opportunities” nepotism.

And this is what makes the proposal by the Oxford Classics Faculty so dangerous. It is driven by a coalition of barbarians. Some of these want to ruin the classics. Others just want to shut them down. The proposal must be resisted.

So far, I have argued for a particular view of education in negative terms – sneering at the various tribes of barbarian who want to make it “useful,” or into a mass of sinecures for the evil-intentioned. For a positive argument, I can do no better than quote John Henry Newman, whose Idea of a University is of permanent value. For him, the purpose of education is to cultivate the intellect. Everything else of marketable value comes from this:

… general culture of mind is the best aid to professional and scientific study, and educated men can do what illiterate cannot; and the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a taste or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense then, and as yet I have said but a very few words on a large subject, mental culture is emphatically useful.

Arguing against the cultural leftists is a waste of time. Their own output is, for the most part, self-refuting trash, though arguing too hotly against it may nowadays invite attention from the police. But there is an easy reply to the worshippers of “fact.” This is that England became the first industrial nation, and pioneered the main theoretical sciences, and conquered a quarter of the world with a ruling class schooled in the Greek and Roman classics, and in little else. And if the modernisation of other countries allowed a shifting about of comparative advantage after 1870, we remained great and rich and powerful down to 1914, after which we beat the more “scientific” Germans in all matters of science and technology.

 And if our involvement may not have been entirely wise, it was our science and technology that won the Second World War. And if our science and technology fell increasingly on stony ground in this country after 1945, that was because our rulers were progressively embracing the cult of immediate usefulness. We are now broken as a nation because we grovel at the feet of rulers who cannot parse a sentence in their own language, let alone in Greek.

Therefore, I suggest, the proposal of the Oxford Classics Faculty should be denounced – even, and perhaps especially, by those who do not themselves know Greek or Latin.

SOURCE 






Reinvigorating the Teaching of American History

It’s no secret that many of today’s students are ignorant of American history and of how American democracy works. According to a 2018 survey conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, only 1 in 3 Americans would be able to pass the U.S. citizenship test. Clearly, the current education system—at the K-12 and college levels—has failed to do its job. And that includes the University of North Carolina system schools.

According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), none of the UNC system schools require students to take “a survey course in either U.S. government or history with enough chronological and/or topical breadth to expose students to the sweep of American history and institutions.” In fact, of all the 49 North Carolina colleges and universities that ACTA evaluated, only two schools fully met the above criteria.

Fortunately, there are now a number of initiatives that aim to fill the gaps in students’ historical knowledge. One of those initiatives is the American History for Freedom program. The Martin Center sat down with the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill to learn more about the program.

Pfeffer Merrill is director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Campus Free Expression Project, which promotes viewpoint diversity and free expression on college campuses.

Could you give a little background on the American History for Freedom program?

Thanks for the interest in this too-little-known but important program! The American History for Freedom (AHF) program was added to the American Higher Education Act when that Act was last reauthorized by Congress in 2008. Just a brief reminder from readers’ high school civics class: When Congress authorizes a program, that doesn’t mean that the appropriate federal department or agency will start setting it up. For that to happen, Congress also must appropriate funds to establish and run the program. To date, that second step hasn’t happened.

The good news is that there is fresh bipartisan interest in the AHF program. Last year, a bipartisan group of eight Senators introduced the USA Civics Act of 2019, which would reauthorize this program. That bill isn’t likely to be passed in this Congress, but it is a strong signal that there is bipartisan support to see the AHF program funded in this budget cycle, which kicked off when the president sent his 2021 budget proposal to Congress on February 10. The House and Senate are beginning the long process of preparing a budget resolution, which could include a first-time appropriation for the program.

What is the status of the program today?

AHF was signed into law as part of the Higher Education Act of 2008, but never received appropriations funding. However, Congress has the ability to fund the program through the current appropriations process.

I’m sure some of your readers do worry about adding yet another federal spending program. But I’d liken the AHF program to infrastructure programs. We need ongoing investment in our highways, ports, digital capacity, and the like so the economy will grow over the decades ahead. Likewise, we need ongoing investment in what I’d call our intellectual infrastructure so that we can have a healthy democracy, with citizens who know their history and Constitution. Investing in the AHF program is an intellectual infrastructure investment that will pay civic dividends for decades to come.

There are reports that students leave college with little knowledge of American history. How little do students actually know and how would the program help solve that problem?

Alas, the reports about what people, including the college-educated, know about American history and how our government works are pretty depressing. A survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that less than 40 percent of respondents—and only a little more than half of college graduates—could correctly answer a multiple-choice question about the length of terms for members of Congress. More than half of respondents—and a third of college graduates—did not know that the Bill of Rights is the name given to a group of Constitutional amendments. I could go on, but I don’t think there’s doubt graduates and the public too often don’t know basic facts about our history and government. That has real consequences: people don’t know how to be engaged citizens, and they lack the knowledge to contextualize current events and controversies in a longer, broader understanding of our past.

Why do too many Americans know so little about American history and how our government works? One factor for the widespread historical and civic illiteracy is simply that these subjects are not being taught, or taught with enough rigor, in K–12. A recent study found that only eight of the 50 states require a year-long course in civics and government, and only 28 states require a year-long course in U.S. history. Too often teachers are not as ready as they should be—or as they want to be—to teach about our country.

Thankfully, the AHF program has a specific provision to address the K–12 teaching of civics and history. The program can fund teacher preparation programs that will “stress content mastery.” It can also fund collaborations with local educational agencies, allowing teachers who are already in the classrooms to access programs that will boost their knowledge. This is a real opportunity to better prepare those who will be teaching civics and U.S. history in our primary and secondary schools.

The AHF program will be a real boon to funding programs and centers that will deepen college and university students’ knowledge of our country. That’s especially important since the number of students majoring in history has plunged since the Great Recession, even as college enrollment has risen. Much of the programming funded may be co-curricular activities, lecture series, and events that will attract students who are not history majors. We want students in STEM fields, in pre-professional majors, and business programs—those who may not have learned much U.S. history and civics in primary and secondary schools—to have another chance to pick up this knowledge on campus.

By funding programs and centers that can equip students with historical knowledge in which to contextualize current affairs and understand how our political and civic institutions can address today’s challenges. The AHF can help prepare students to be the next generation of leaders, move our country past its current polarization, and restore our traditions of civility, mutual respect, and pragmatic compromise.

SOURCE 






Shocking standard of new teachers in Australia

They don't know primary school stuff, let alone show any benefit of a university education.  It's a tremendous revelation of non-existent school standards.  The blind are leading the blind.  No wonder so many parents send kids to private schools

Clare Masters

GRADUATE teachers are leaving university, without basic literacy skills, including spelling and grammar, and are increasingly needing tutoring to pass the literacy portion of their qualifying exam.

Tutoring agencies are seeing a rise in the number of graduates seeking help to pass the Federal Government's Literacy and Numeracy Tests for the Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE) test, required to become a teacher, and experts are saying the test should be done as an entrance' exam to weed out unsuccessful candidates.

Some agencies say students are struggling with basic skills like fractions, grammar and even knowing the number of weeks in a year. "We have been surprised by the number of university students studying to be teachers who are seeking assistance with their literacy skills to pass their LANTITE, and who may have already failed this test a number of times," said Dr Selina Samuels, chief learning officer at tutoring service Cluey. She said there had been over 750 inquiries for LANTITE support in just four months.

Teacher Melinda Wood, from The Tutoring Academy, said many of her students were missing basic foundation skills. "With literacy, they don't know the simple rules for grammar, punctuation and how to spell or do fractions.

"I had one student who didn't attend primary school in her own country and came to Year 8 in Australia and has difficulty reading. She is doing a Masters of Education and she is struggling a lot."

Ms Wood gave one example of a question that asked students to estimate an annual income from weekly pays and said students were failing it in practice tests as they "don't know how many weeks are in a year".

"They use spell check and stuff at home to help them but the. second they are in exam conditions they don't know how to cope."

The recent PISA scores show Australian students are falling behind and Centre for Independent Studies' Blaise Joseph said a teacher's core skills needed to be high. "Evidence shows it is really important teachers be high achievers. Over the years we have lowered the bar for entry standard for teacher education degrees," he said.

"We have about one in five Australian students below the minimum standard for literacy and that is going to be reflected in new teacher intakes. It defies common sense you have uni students who don't have basic literacy and numeracy skills who are then going to be responsible for teaching literacy and numeracy to children."

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 24/2/20