Concordia

Concordia Winter 2021

Classics in the Curriculum

Head of Classics, Philip Harrison, examines the place of Classics in the curriculum today. Despite contemporary pressures, he finds cause for optimism in the continuation of the rich tradition of Classicists at Merchant Taylors’.

and amid a national focus on STEM and social sciences. Despite such existential nerves, the Classical subjects, and those who teach them, have demonstrated remarkable tenacity in recent years. Latin is studied by all Thirds and Upper Thirds, and by most in Fourth Form. In recent years we have introduced a joint Greek and Latin course for Fourths, which has meant that around 30 boys each year begin Greek, with around ten continuing to GCSE – healthy numbers compared with most schools. Around 40 boys usually study Latin, some of whom have started with us in Third Form, and some of whom have joined in Fourth Form after starting their Latin in one of the local prep schools who have sent us many of our finest Classicists over the years. At A Level, we are a subject of choice for the discerning all-rounder: for surely no other subject can offer the combination of language, literature, history, and philosophy that are found here. Our current Lower Sixth Classicists are covering all of these areas in their current set texts, studied in the original Greek and Latin, as they encounter the chaos of AD69 in Tacitus’ Histories 1 , the appalling tragedy of Medea , Plato’s thoughts on the soul in the Phaedo , and Virgil’s Aeneid (albeit Book 11!). These texts will doubtless sound familiar to OMTs going back several generations, and indeed centuries. It is always with a certain sense of gravity that I point out to pupils beginning their study of Virgil’s Aeneid in Fifth Form (Virgil is always a set text for GCSE) that what they are reading has been studied at Merchant Taylors’ throughout its existence, and in schools ever since it was first written. The syllabuses at GCSE and A Level have changed little in recent years: the subjects – and we teach Greek and Latin, though there is a possibility of Classical Civilisation in the not too distant future – are divided equally between Language and Literature, with prose and verse texts studied for both courses. The exams at both GCSE and A Level require unseen translation, optional prose composition (or a challenging comprehension), and essays and gobbets on the set texts. Herein lies a

Greek disappeared as a requirement for university entrance several decades ago. Now Latin has gone too, and though it is perhaps impossible to predict with any exactness the effect in the next decade or two on school curricula, it is hard to imagine that it could be anything but severely negative on the numbers studying classical languages. That there is some kind of crisis [in the teaching of Classics] is certain, on the continent as well as in Britain, and it is no good saying complacently that we have heard all the arguments before. So wrote Sir Moses Finley in 1964 in the celebrated collection of essays Crisis in the Humanities . He goes on to speculate, with some considerable anxiety, on the future of Classics in schools and in universities, and suggests ways by which the Classical subjects might survive. In many respects, the Classicist’s existential anxieties persist now as they did in 1964 – and they had existed, as Finley points out in quoting John Locke, for some time before that. Classics is probably the subject whose nature and purpose are the most mysterious to boys and their parents who visit the school on open mornings, and countless times do we Classics teachers receive responses of surprise, incomprehension, and even delight when it is explained to these boys and their parents that all boys who start the school at 11 study Latin. The place of Classics in a school curriculum is hardly a given – no such reaction is elicited when it is explained that History, Geography, the Sciences, and so on are taught to our Third Formers, and Classics is not a part of the National Curriculum. In addition, successive governments have been vocal in their support of STEM subjects, and a focus of this government’s strategy launched in March 2020 is ‘Boosting science uptake at school.’ As a result, the Classics teacher at Merchant Taylors’ and elsewhere feels some nerves at the time their pupils choose their options for GCSE and A Level, and discover the number of pupils who are to continue with their subjects. It is undeniably difficult to convince pupils to pursue Latin and Greek as two of their three A Levels, in an ever more crowded school curriculum,

18