The LEP, brought in by the Conservatives in 2022, gave students in forty state schools across the country the chance to study Latin to GCSE. It funded resources and teacher salaries, as well as trips to Roman heritage sites in the UK and beyond. The programme was designed to address the fact that, whilst 49% of Key Stage 3 pupils in private schools learn Latin, this figure doesn’t even reach 3% in the state sector. These statistics have knock-on effects in higher education.
A key example of this is that Cambridge University requires Classics students without Latin A-Level to follow the four-year version of the course, rather than the standard three-year one. This means that the course costs more for state-school students who never got the chance to study Latin at school and makes social mobility harder later in life because they will likely be paying off their loans for longer. Despite this example, the vast majority of Classics degree courses don’t require Latin A-Level, but, at the same time, they are surely going to be less attractive to students who have never studied the languages, literature or history of the Ancients before, making it difficult for the subject to break with its past of being the preserve of the elite.
For centuries, studying the Classics has been seen as a cornerstone of a well-rounded education in the humanities. Interestingly, this continues to be the case in several European countries, with Latin being a core subject for students who focus their high school studies on literature, history or languages. Indeed, I signed up for a beginner’s Latin course as part of my semester in Spain, only to find out that the vast majority of the class had studied Latin for their ‘bachillerato’ (the Spanish A-Level equivalent). I have found that both in France and Spain, studying ‘dead’ languages and cultures as part of a humanities degree is pushed much more than it is in the UK.
I think that one of the key reasons for this, especially for literature degrees, is that nearly all the great writers were educated in the Classics, so classical references proliferate through their works, making them difficult for the uninitiated to understand. Moreover, Latin vocabulary pops up all the time in the fields of law and medicine, and I believe that studying Latin makes it easier to learn other languages due to the highly theoretical nature of learning a dead language which makes focusing in on how grammatical structures and etymological processes work all the more important.
Nevertheless, there will always be complaints about Latin being on any school curriculum since it is not useful for everyday life. I will admit that this argument is valid in the sense that Latin is a ‘dead’ language that you can’t exactly use to get around on holiday, however I don’t believe that everything you learn at school really needs to be useful in that sense of the word. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever used trigonometry since GCSE, but I don’t think that it should be scrapped from the curriculum.
Conversely, I believe that our education system should give us the tools we need to learn the things that are useful to us as individuals, and I think that these tools can be acquired by studying a vast array of subjects. Moreover, I strongly believe that learning for the sake of learning is absolutely worthwhile since, no matter the subject, the process of learning moulds our brains so that they can take in more information in the future.
In conclusion, I strongly believe that Latin should be offered to all students in all schools. And no, by this I’m not saying that everyone should be forced to take Latin for GCSE, but I do think that everyone should be able to try it out and then decide for themselves whether they want to continue studying it or not. Even if schools lack the resources to offer Latin within the school day, I think that there should be a way of pointing interested students towards online resources or after-school clubs that can foster their interest in the Ancients because, why should the ability to understand Latin inscriptions found on building or in museums be reserved for people who happened to go to private school?
