Writing exclusively for The Leaders Council, Andrew Clowes, headteacher of Hey with Zion Primary School in Oldham, Lancashire, explains why he is bucking the trend and teaching classics at his state primary school.
I am introducing classics at my state church primary school in Oldham.
Why? What relevance has the ancient world for today’s children?
There are so many reasons. The study of classics- their languages and civilisations- has so much to offer our society and by marginalising it as we have, we are the poorer.
There is a wonderful charity called Classics For All which offers free support to state schools throughout the country to introduce and build upon any current classics provision they offer. My school will be teaming up with it.
So what are the reasons?
Firstly, let me state the obvious. Vocabulary.
Everybody knows that vocabulary enrichment is a good thing. Schools very much now rely on research to test their ideas and the evidence for vocabulary enrichment is strong. John Hattie (Visible Learning, 2008) found that vocabulary programmes are one of the most efficient ways of accelerating learning, and Alex Quigley (Closing The Vocabulary Gap, 2018) highlighted how building etymology and morphology in the classroom can help children better understand and use language.
An introduction to classics is perfect for this, showing children how our current language has derived in so many ways from ancient roots. I am not advocating that our primary children should be required to grapple with gerunds, ablative absolutes and suchlike, but to be aware of roots and developments in our language, and that they seek connections between different words with common roots, can be helpful.
Thought and language are interdependent. Language expresses, but also shapes and frames our thoughts. Therefore to maximise and optimise our vocabulary is to maximise and optimise our thinking and understanding. When we can express ourselves with precision, we can think more precisely too.
Culture
I wrote previously about how our society is struggling currently with its own sense of what it is; what are our common values. Studying classics can help with this.
It is easy to point at moments in history and wonder how things might have turned out differently for us now, had a different course been taken then. What if the Spanish Armada had won, and Drake lost? What if Catherine of Aragon had given birth to a boy instead of a girl?
Consider what we have gained from the ancient world. What did the Greeks give us? Democracy. Theatre. Science. Philosophy. Stadium sports. Imagine a world which had not known Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. Not known Thales, Pythagorus or Archimedes. Never seen Greek architecture. Nor heard those wonderful Greek myths.
How would the industrial revolution have been different without the water mill, invented by the Ancient Greeks?
When your alarm clock wakes you tomorrow morning, thank the Ancient Greeks for inventing it. It is thanks to them you will get to work on time.
What about the Romans? What have they ever done for us? Quite a lot. Roads. Currency. Towns. Sanitation systems. Underfloor heating. Bath houses. Advertising. Bureaucracy. Even fast food. And a lot of our words.
The Ancient Roman Empire lasted about 500 years, so one should be cautious about making time specific statements, but much of it was marked with a level of brutality and values that we would find abhorrent today. Cato is often held up as an example of a Roman statesman with high moral principles, yet he said nothing to counter the subjugation of women, and to my knowledge never questioned the rightness of slavery.
We should encourage all to be judged by the standards of their time. However, gladiatorial fights to the death, fustuarium, crucifixion and being executed by being fed to animals are not just appalling to the modern mind. Many loathed them then.
Yet they teach us just how bad human behaviour can be if left unchecked. It is a key benefit to society of children learning history. Coping in this time, either by trying to rise within the system as did Caesar and Cicero, or maintaining some kind of personal mental equilibrium amidst it all as did philosophers such as Seneca and Epicurus, gave us leadership and wordsmith excellence that continues to enthral today, gave us philosophy of rare beauty which consoles and nurtures still.
The classical era represents our cultural roots. Let the children learn to appreciate what we have inherited, that they preserve the good and protect against the excesses.
Christianity
Ancient Rome was also the dominant culture into which Jesus Christ was born.
Jesus Christ was born and died in the Roman Empire. Jesus did not speak Latin. He spoke Aramaic, but probably knew some Hebrew and Greek. It is likely he knew only a few Latin words. However it was the language of the dominant culture of his time, and was the language of the church from the fourth century, once St. Jerome translated the Greek and Hebrew scriptures into Latin.
It is the language of the first ever printed book (The Gutenberg Bible, mid 15th century).
There are over 6000 church primary schools in England (37% of the total); over 600 church secondary schools (18% of the total). The church was born in the Roman Empire.
Let the children learn about it.
