Is this the end of Latin in state schools?

[Edmontine]

Depressing news:

The Guardian

Maths is useful for the following careers

Actuary

Statistician

Accountant

Market Research Analyst

Engineering

Financial Analyst

Economist

Data science

Mathematician

Meteorologist

Insurance Underwriter

Mathematics Teacher

Banking

Financial planner

Market research

Software engineer

Secondary School Teacher

Actuarial Analyst

Budget Analyst

Chemical Engineer

Chemist

Academic researcher

Aerospace engineer

Astronomer

Learning for the joy of it disappeared yonks ago. Michael Gove I’m looking at you.

Struggling to see how GCSE French has helped me.

🤷‍♀️ you call education the foundation. With a good education the world is a different place. So yes, I would prioritise it.

It's really not useless. A lot of science and medicine still uses Latin. It's a very useful language if you bother to learn it.

No child can teach themselves it.

Nonsense. Any child who is bright enough to learn Latin (or biology or coding or astronomy or African history or anything else) can teach themselves. Resources are boundless on the internet.
Whether the child would have the inclination and dedication is another matter.

Agree, so many plant names have Latin as their descriptions- Papaver somniferum
( Causes somnolence) Just by reading their Latin names one gets an idea as to what effect the plant has, or it’s physical appearance, or geographical location.

It’s a great shame that it is now mainly a Public school subject.
It should be available for everyone who wants to learn it.

I’m not trying to put works in your mouth. You have identified in your opinion things that you consider important- using your metric I think the majority of what you have said fall into the can do at a-level and you don’t need to do at gcse. why does drama/art give you a better grounding in life than Latin?

all you have proved is that people’s interests are completely subjective. Some people are into science/ linguistics/ art and other people are interested in history/classics/ancient languages. I think GCSE’s are the time when you can pick and choose anything that your heart desires to work out what interests you before you end up specialising. In my opinion Aside from English and maths I don’t think anything else should be compulsory. Many children wouldn’t know they would excel at something like Latin unless their had tried it at GCSe. It would be quite a risk to pick it at A-level without having any idea of you are any good at it!

Same for chemistry, physics and biology.

No need to force all DC to study all 3 when they're not interested.

Funnily enough, having an actual teacher who is inspiring can be fundamental to education.

Then why bother with school at all if children can just teach themselves off the internet?

But lots and lots of people use Latin every day without having done a GCSE in it. I don’t think it’s true that you need to have studied Latin to kow what “caveat emptor” or “inter alia” means, or how to spell “et cetera”. You can just look these things up online or in an English dictionary, or ask someone. That fact that these phrases are Latin doesn’t make them any more difficult to learn than any other words. And no different to learning what schadenfreude or déja vu mean.

Having studied Latin, I can still remember how to decline a noun but I have no need to apply my advanced grammar to the Latin expressions that I use in daily life. (Also, I never had a Latin lesson in which we went through all the common Latin terms used in English and science meant. Those were taught in English and science lessons!)

You could definitely make the argument that Latin is considerably more useful as a subject than RE.

After all, there are plenty of religious organisations who could use their time and money to set up free after school GCSE sessions for those who are interested (or they could teach themselves off the internet).

As regards Latin helping with other subjects - I did Latin O Level, (and was very good at it) and later a law degree and found my Latin knowledge was only a tiny bit of help with my degree. Not worth the time spent.

I also did French A Level and found knowing French just as helpful as Latin in my later learning of Romance languages like Italian and Spanish. I would rather have spent the time in which I learned Latin learning Italian or Spanish.

I'm currently in the early stages of learning Hungarian, for which no other language is useful for most vocab, it seems. And you know, it's not that bad. You just learn it. (krumpli = potato, bíró = judge)

Gradgrindinism, red in tooth and claw!

My DD is in her final year of French at university and regrets not having done Latin. A dangerous example of one, I know.

The bigger point about this debate for me is that Labour (I am a Labour voter, BTW) is focused on having a one-size-fits-all approach when what we should be considering is diversity of provision as pupils are diverse - more or less academic, more or less study focused, more or less practically orientated, SEN. There's a lot of talk about AI in schools (Peter Kyle yesterday saying ChatGPT is fine to use for homework) but little about how digital can achieve economies of scale in teaching some subjects. Latin delivered online to GCSE level to hundreds of pupils logging into lessons would keep it going, and be a choice for the minority who are interested.

We keep asking for more to be added to the curriculum so inevitably some subjects will be taught less or eliminated . Latin is one subject we can live without and will have less impact than dropping Music and French which are also heading the same way

Absolutely @IdaGlossop we have had the tech for ages now to support online learning of less popular subjects, online learning in general, school and subject diversity and there is nothing left wing or socialist about reducing knowledge down to things that are directly useful, unless we're going full technocratic communism...

Anything your heart desires? Sure, in a perfect world with an unlimited amount of funding and teachers in those subjects. In the real world though funding and staff are finite.

Students have been studying for fun outside of school since the dawn of time. Nothing to stop them learning Latin in the evenings, just as those who do sport, dance, music. I don't see Latin at GCSE level as essential, that's all.

My guess is that we are going to see more and more parents move to some kind of online home-school provision now that private options are going to become unaffordable (if they still exist in some areas) and grammars become near impossible to access.

I've been very interested watching some of my friends who home-school and their children are getting stellar grades, an incredibly varied education and plenty of socialising through groups and meet-ups.

DD is done with school at the end of this year, so not something I have to think about, but if a government brought in a one-size-fits-all system which didn't offer the choices my child wanted, then I reckon giving up work to home-school would be my choice.

What a great idea!
Let’s abolish all schools and let children motivate themselves to teach themselves to read and write, and then do exams.

Same for skilled trades- Just teach yourself gas fitting, plumbing, harness making,Joinery and a myriad other skills.

It's amazing how much plumbing you can pick on YouTube 😂

So can’t they carry on providing it then? If enough pupils want to take it?

Funnily enough, celebrating working class culture as well as what is seen as more middle class culture is exactly the kind of thing Lee Elliot Majors suggested, according to the Times:

Instead of museums, Major said schools could visit local football clubs and grounds for tours exploring how they have served local communities for generations. He also suggested that they could collaborate with artists and musicians to explore grime and rap music or brass bands and community choirs, attend graffiti art workshops reflecting local culture or invite tradespeople to speak or run workshops.

archive.ph/FgM2Q

Yup. And papaver cambricum "from Wales" tells you where it is from. "Perforatum" has holes or translucent spots, "Punctata" is spotty, "rubens" is pink or red, "alba" white.

When spelling fuchsia, ignore the pronunciation and think what a plant named for someone called Fuchs would be called.

And rhododendron, learn a little Ancient Greek in years seven and eight as part of Classics, and you too can just think "rose tree" and infer the spelling.

But if they can do it in the evenings why can’t they do it in the school day either online or by parents paying for the teacher?

"Instead of" means "replacement". If he was talking about broadening the cultural offer, which I would agree with, he would say "as well as".