Again, you don't mention which country you're talking about.
"Latin was very common in state and private primaries."
Speaking personally, I started junior school in 1972 and started secondary school in 1976.
I do not recollect any state junior schools back then offering Latin - and only one of the secondary schools did.
I was part of the first cohort in the county where I lived that was a comprehensive intake into secondary schools (ie the 11+ exam had finished the year before).
For context, I attended the junior school that had regularly got the highest number of pupils going to grammar school while the 11+ still existed. So this was exactly the sort of junior school, if any, that you might expect to teach Latin. But there was no Latin at all. Lots of PE and games though **.
To be fair, there was one of the three ex-grammar schools that did still teach Latin after then. Although, looking at the figures, only 18 out of approx 140 pupils sat Latin GCSE this year.
The other two grammar schools dropped Latin when they became comprehensives.
My experience was very different indeed compared to yours.
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** I'm not in any way endorsing the attitudes of this columnist, but my experience of junior school in the 1970s was very similar.
About ten years later, I had the same headteacher as this guy (although, as girls, we only got to play rounders and netball rather than football and cricket):-
Mr Chips is making a comeback
For four years, from age seven to 11, the most important man in my life, after my father, was Eric Sutton.
I certainly saw more of him than my dad, who was often away on business. Mr Sutton — never Eric, heaven forfend — was there five, sometimes six, days a week.
He was the headmaster of my primary school, an important influence in my formative years. Mr Sutton had the air of a Regimental Sergeant Major and ran the school with military efficiency — not surprising, really, given that he’d served as an NCO in the Army Education Corps during World War II.
He had a piercing parade-ground bark, which could halt small boys in their tracks up to 100 yards away. That said, his bark was worse than his bite.
Mr Sutton was a disciplinarian with a fearsome cane on the wall of his study. I can’t remember him ever wielding it in anger. Maybe I’ve simply forgotten. But the prospect was deterrent enough.
If he did have to administer corporal punishment, it would have been in the spirit of the old adage: This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you, boy.
[...]
Mr Sutton was a great believer in the virtues of sport. Our Dickensian school building didn’t have a playing field, so he’d march us crocodile-style to the local ‘rec’, rain or shine. In winter, we played football, in summer cricket.
After school and on Saturdays, he’d take teams to compete in tournaments. And he expected us to win. Eric Sutton would never settle for second best.
All this team sport was in addition to several sessions of vigorous PE every week and trips to the local open-air swimming pool.
He may have lain great importance on our physical development, but he gave equal — if not more — weight to nurturing our intellectual capacity.
These days, ‘passion’ is a much abused cliche. Every inept reality TV contestant professes their ‘passion’ for everything from fairy cakes to break-dancing. But Mr Sutton really was passionate about education in general and literacy in particular.
It was his ambition to get as many of his pupils as possible into grammar school, which he saw as the gateway to a better future. He succeeded spectacularly, his school regularly topping the table of 11-plus passes.
Some younger readers may think this sounds like a posh prep school for the privileged children of the well-off. Nothing could be further from the truth.
West Town Juniors and Mixed Infants, Williamson Avenue, Peterborough, was what we would now call a ‘bog standard’ state school.
But there was nothing ‘bog standard’ about the ethos instilled by Eric Sutton, who could have held his own in any exclusive fee-paying establishment.
He was a dapper man who always wore a sports jacket, complete with leather patches on the elbows, and cavalry twill trousers. He wouldn’t have been seen dead without a shirt and tie — unlike some of the slovenly scruffs on parade at the teachers’ union conferences every Easter.