Catholics should care about Labour’s attack on Latin in schools

Joseph Shaw • January 17, 2025

The Labour government seems to be taking a very ideological approach to education policy, apparently reversing many of the policies of the previous Conservative administration on principle.

The champion of traditional discipline and rigour, headmistress Katherine Birbalsingh, recently laid out the strands of the new approach in the Spectator. One that should be of particular concern for Catholics is the attack on the teaching of Latin.

They are ending a scheme, costing a tiny £4 million and which enabled a number of state schools to fund the subject, half-way through the academic year, meaning that those children, including many in deprived areas, who have invested scores of hours in it will be prevented from sitting the GCSE. There is something a little unhinged about this dislike of Latin.

It is of a piece with the imposition of VAT on school fees – again, in the middle of an academic year – and the agenda against fox-hunting, which no longer actually threatens any foxes, fluffy or otherwise, and only follows an artificial scent. Independent schools and people “hunting” with dogs are markers, if often not very accurate ones, of class status. So are school uniforms, apparently, and so is knowledge of Latin.

Latin is both cursed and blessed as a marker of class. It may be that during the time in which “utility” was the watchword of the educational establishment, the subject’s snob-value saved it from complete disappearance. But this inevitably deepened the association between Latin and “posh schools” – and there is a kind of educational radical that sees such markers of status not as something which could be made accessible to those hitherto shut out from them, but simply as badges of the enemy, to be attacked wherever they are found.

If people really do regard Latin as a status-symbol, then it represents good value-for-money for those families and schools who want to give their children a bit of a boost. More prosaically, however, it has solid pedagogical advantages.

It is often said that Latin, and the humanities in general, give students “transferable skills” that will make them more employable. It’s true that Latin will give you a leg up in learning modern romance languages, but that is a pretty marginal advantage, and this is the wrong way to understand the point of studying the humanities.

First, more so than other languages, and more like Maths and the sciences, proficiency in Latin is difficult to fake. This means that Latin qualifications are respected as indications of intelligence and attainment. The role of public examinations and degrees of all kinds in furnishing students with outward signs simply of being bright and diligent, as opposed to giving them specific knowledge and skills which may be useful in the world of work, is one of education’s embarrassing little secrets – but it is clearly true.

Secondly, the study of any serious and rigorous subject is a training for the mind. It is not that understanding the difference between the meanings of different grammatical forms is a “transferable skill”; it is that acquiring this understanding is a training in careful and subtle thinking. It makes you the kind of person who can see that there are such things as subtle differences, and that these can be important, and that it can be worth sweating over them a bit to get them right, in whatever department of life one might find them.

Thirdly, Latin is the doorway to the patrimony of Western culture, just as Classical Arabic is for Islamic culture, and Sanskrit is for Indian culture. It is absurd to be embarrassed about this, and equally absurd to get caught up in a debate about whether one culture is better than another. For the society currently subject to the diktats of the British government, Western culture is both the overwhelmingly dominant culture and the only common culture, and it follows that we should give children access to it. We can simultaneously acknowledge the importance of Arabic and Sanskrit too.

This is true for everyone living in a society of European culture, and in the era of mass media, the only people not subject to the influence of art, films and songs loaded with classical themes and references are members of un-contacted tribes in the Amazon – and perhaps not even them.

But this culture has a special importance for Catholics, for Latin is not only the language of the Caesars, of Roman Law, and of Enlightenment science: it is also the language of the Catholic Church. This is not a question limited to the liturgy: the Church as a society has a common culture, which overlaps with national and local cultures, and this culture is not English or French or German, but Latin.

It is in Latin that we find the history of the culture, its poetry, its law, its philosophy, its bawdy songs and its most elevated thought: not all of it, but the vast majority of it, and the most influential examples. It is for these reasons that Pope John Paul II remarked in 1980: “The Roman Church has special obligations towards Latin, the splendid language of ancient Rome, and she must manifest them whenever the occasion presents itself” (Dominicae Cenae).

The point can be obscured in school Latin, which has over the centuries sought to avoid association with the Catholic Faith. The so-called Golden Age of the language, an almost comically brief, if influential, moment in its long and continuing history, is given absolute priority over everything else, leading to absurd results. Teaching Latin through Virgil (as happens even at GCSE) is like teaching English as a foreign language through the Metaphysical Poets.

On the other hand, Latin is currently experiencing a revival, and many innovative approaches to teaching it are being tested, including the “spoken method”, treating it more like a modern language. Readers who are inspired to look into Latin courses will find online options on the Latin Mass Society website, and through language-learning resources popping up on Twitter/X.

The Education Minister Bridget Phillipson should beware: if Latin is a dead language, that may mean it is actually all the more difficult to kill.

Photo: School boys at a Catholic high-school in Japan learning basic Latin, circa 1956. (Photo by Evans/Three Lions/Getty Images.)

Dr Joseph Shaw is Chairman of the Latin Mass Society (lms.org.uk), President of Una Voce International (fiuv.org), and a public philosopher and freelance writer.