CLASSICAL STUDY IN N.Z. EDUCATION

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25306, 4 October 1947, Page 8

CLASSICAL STUDY IN N.Z. EDUCATION

CULTURE AND TRADITION

(Specially Written for “The Press.”) [By L. G. POCOCK, Professor of Classics, Canterbury University Collet,.]

Winston Churchill, in his book “My Early Life,” tells us that he found Latin a misery at school. He was one of those boys who develop later than their fellows. As he grew older, he discovered in himself an immense avidity for reading and for thinking over what he read. As a subaltern in India, when others had their siesta, he read Gibbon and laid the foundations of his future literary and oratorical style. At this time, he says, his imagination became .very active and he coined for himself many flue, epigrammatic sentences and aphorisms to express his thoughts. When he tried these out in public, his better educated friends, with kindly smiles, would refer him to such and such a passage in Horace, Vergil, or Tacitus; and he found to his annoyance that the Romans, 2000 years ago, had as it were already taken out the patent for almost every variety of such expressions. He suggests, thereiore, that at school every boy should be made to know the literature and grammar of his native tongue and only those who work well and make good progress should be allowed, as a prize, a reward, a treat, to study Latin and Greek. Language All-Important This is, at first sight, a reasonable suggestion; but Nir Churchill was not imaging a possible state of affairs in wnicn there might be no facilities at the school for such study, no encouragement for it, even positive dissuasion. That is a prospect which genuinely disturbs and dismays many people in this country to-day, including of course those whose responsibility it is to teach the classics, the foreign languages, and the English tongue. For language, beyond all argument, is the greatest gift of man; it distinguishes him from the beasts; it has made for him a new and permanent world of the imagination; it is not only the basis of reason, it is in one form or another Reason itself, the Word which was in the Beginning. Language, in short, is all-important and must always be one of the main subjects and objects of education; and, to put it baldly, it is not possible to be a student, in the full sense of the word, of English without some knowledge of Latin, the progenitor of most of the languages of Western Europe. This I think will not be denied. But, it will be said, we cannot all be scholars; there are such things as the circumstances of modern life; we must all to quite a large extent be specialists; education is lor the many, not the few; there are always some individuals gilted in other respects who have not the gift for linguistic study; there are many boys and girls who are not interested in study at all—the best we can do is to provide a modicum of general education for all and let the brilliant ones shift for themselves; they will probably be all right. This is reasonable and up to a point valid; but the danger is obvious. the danger that they may not be all right and that you will be gradually dragging down the general standard. (This indeed is one of the problenfs with which Western democracy must cope if it is to succeed and survive.)

The Usefulness of Latin So, arguing against Mr Churchill and a fortiori against our New Zealand educationists, who have made. I regret to say, a sort of crusade against the teaching of languages, I will- make the following points: 1. It cannot be stated too emphatically that in every word of Latin a student studies he is studying the use and structure of language in general, and his own language in particular. 2. There are not many students who, though they may find Latin difficult and appear to make little progress, have not a better conception of their own language for having toiled at it (Here I would include Mr Churchill, Who, I am sure, would not be the man he is had he not had the education he had and in his youth struggled with the rudiments of language, through the medium of Latin.) 3. While I would not claim that the study of Latin is essential to the speaking and writing of good English, it is for the majority, even of

the non-studious, the best general instrument of education to that ena 4. To anyone who aspires to be a real student of his native tongue, it is essential. He must know something of Latin, as a surgeon or physician must know something of human anatomy. 5. The advanced study of the classics includes the origin of European language, religion, literature. art philosophy, law, and political theory’ Our culture is a Graeco-Roman one and the tradition must be maintained Without a tradition man is a ship without a rudder and “not to know something of what has gone before is to be a child.” Education must look backward as well as forward. 6. The tradition can only be main, tained by maintaining encouragement in and facilities for such studies by a reasonable proportion of our youth. 7. This is where I join issue with the educationists and our New Zealand system. In some quarters there is active discouragement. arising partly from admitted difficulties, partly from prejudices. There is little encouragement to the teacher or the pupil when in the School Certificate examination the studious boy taking Latin or French gets some 65 per cent., the less talented lad who has taken refuge in Animal Husbandry some 85 per cent. It is right that young people should study that which interests them; but it is also dangerous to let them follow the line of least resistance in their choice. Everyone will agree that unless we are made to do so, we would never do many things that are difficult in the beginning, but good for us at the time ana beneficial to us thereafter. As for facilities. I believe that it is now very hard to find adequate time on the school syllabus for the proper teaching of languages and that at many of the smaller secondary schools Latin and French will disappear altogether. That Great, First Fault 8. I can see the difficulties which confront the schools and the Department of Education. My quarrel is rather with the University, which started the rot where it was least necessary and most pernicious by abolishing the compulsory foreign language clause in the B.A. prescription. This came to pass primarily as the result of a long campaign by the educationists, who were incensed by the social injustice of their students being unable to get a B.A. because they had not the wits to pass in Latin or French. Offered a diploma for such instead of the degree, they indignantly refused it, as they wanted the academic prestige of a B.A. They now have it 9. These are not, or should not be, personal matters. Let us, also, in discussing them, be reasonable and avoid the emotional, demagogic style which may take people in—and. indeed, I believe, built us our Choral Hall—but Is as far from real education as the North Pole is from the South. I would like to conclude by quoting the following from an article written for “Canta” two years ago by Mr E. Badian, now of Victoria University College, on an address given by Mr T. S. Eliot:— His thesis, in this case, is not a general defence of classical education. It is simply (io his own words) “that the maintenance of classical education is essential to the maintenance of the continuity of English Literature." Genius, he admits, can perhaps do without special training and will transcend all rules, but even genius is moulded by its environment. In the long run it is thia environment (especially the contemporary second-rate writers) that provides the background against which genius stands out and from which it rises. The present deterioration in literary criticism and in the standards Of the reading public is to a large extent due to the disappearance of the common background of our literature: religion and the classics. Many authors (e.g.. Milton or Gibbon) simply cannot be separated from the background; and even Shakespeare, though he had “small Latin and less Greek,” grew up in a classical environment, and read the classics at least in translation. For the man of letters, then, a Classical education is indispensable (as is alno a Wide “general” education). But if literature is to survive, there must also be a wide public—and not only a narrow circle of eccentrics—capable of understanding the man of letters. • There must, in fact, be the “common background" of our civilisation (Christianity and the classics), which those who think that literature is inOre than an unimportant hobby—those who “accept the contention that the preservation of a living literature ... is the preservation . . . of civilisation -against barbarism”—Cahnot afford to neglect.