Johnathan Pearce writes about the disaster that is modern higher education; the implication that once upon a time it was better – a lot better. So, being the guy who does that YouTube channel can I confirm – or indeed deny – this?
The first thing to say – something that for most Samizdata readers is a statement of the bleeding obvious – is that a hundred years ago very few people went to university and, consequently, there were far fewer universities than there are today. They were also wonderfully archaic. For instance universities elected their own MPs, Cambridge did not allow women to take degrees and the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford had the final say on what plays got staged in the town.
But not everyone is happy. The Independent Labour Party which acted as a party within the Labour Party held a summer school in 1923. A Professor Lindsay, according to The Times of 30 August:
…freely admitted that universities had a Conservative bias, to some extent unalterably so, for the academic mind naturally tended to find reasons why things should not be done…
That sounds like a Good Thing.
…he considered that if universities were not so exclusively devoted to training middle-class people for the professions…
They were? Because how can you hope to do double-entry book keeping without a thorough knowledge of Ancient Greek? Even so, good to see they got over all that training middle-class people stuff.
…if they undertook more political and social teaching and research,
Oh this doesn’t sound good.
bringing them into contact with the life of the working classes,
No fear of that.
the objectionable aspects of this Conservatism would disappear.
Well, you certainly can’t claim that the modern university is a bastion of big-C conservatism.
So, how is this to be done?
Give them a great deal more money
I wasn’t aware that the government in 1923 was giving them any money at all.
use them a great deal more, and leave them alone.
Well, Professor Lindsay, it would appear you got what you wanted. I hope you are happy.
A G. B. Grundy has a rather different view:
Just after the war there came to Oxford a number of men who had served in the Army. In more than thirty years’ experience of teaching in Oxford I do not remember any generation of undergraduates which proved itself more earnest or more able in its work. But that generation has passed away ; and now Oxford is getting the products of the new ideas in education as practised in the public schools. Compulsory Greek has been abolished in order that (sic) more time may be given to modern languages. Judged by results—and we see them in Oxford on a large and comprehensive scale—the average public school boy is, as far as languages are concerned, learning little or nothing at all. Hardly any offer Greek. In Latin examiners are hard put to it to find pieces of prose and unseen such as will make it possible to pass a fair percentage of candidates without a positive outrage to decency… Many cannot write a single sentence of French correctly.
One wonders what these unfortunate lads are going to do for a living after they leave the University ; and one wonders, too, what the parents are going to do when they come to realize the returns on the heavy expenditure on their boys’ education. They will realize this soon, for these sons of theirs, these products of post-war ideas in education, will soon be coming back on their hands ; and then they will have to solve the question of getting employment for those whose ignorance renders them unemployable in the professions and in many forms of business.
I wasn’t aware that the government in 1923 was giving them any money at all.
I seem to recall reading that immediately after the Great War both Oxford and Cambridge were in a dire financial condition and required a bit of a bail out.
A friend of mine, whose testimony I trust, tells me that the modern expensive private schools (what are called “the Public Schools” here in the United Kingdom – much to the confusion of Americans) are now “Woke” to the core – that the people who spend their hard earned money on sending their children to such places are wasting their money, indeed harming the children.
Lee Moore – the Collages of Oxford and Cambridge varied, but yes – the war-inflation and the crash in farming after the war, did a lot of harm.
Did the universities have a “conservative bias” in 1923 – not if one means they were dominated by people who wanted to roll back the state, radically reduce government spending, regulations and taxation, NO.
Someone like President Warren Harding, who really did roll back the state (in the United States), greatly reducing government spending and getting rid of regulations, would have found few kindred spirits in British (or American) universities even in 1923.
But in another sense there was indeed a “conservative bias” in universities in 1923 – as one should remember that, to use blunt language, socialism is an insane cult.
The idea that everything, every farm, shop, factory, and so on, “the means of production, distribution and exchange” (Nottingham conference 1919 – and printed on every Labour Membership card till the 1990s) should be under state control, is insanity – criminal insanity.
It is just the “academic mind” that finds reasons as to why this should not be done, any sane mind would “find reasons as to why this should not be done”.
In 1923 most people in positions of power in British universities were not criminal lunatics (although some were – even then) sadly this was to change over time.
But then, by 1945 almost half the population of Britain were voting for this – unless one believes that they did not know what was written on the back of every Labour Party membership card, or did not understand simple language. I do not know.
Many people, including me, are deeply distressed that 60% of Americans turned their back on the principles of limited government in the Presidential election of 1936 – but Franklin Roosevelt was just splashing money (and not his own money) about in wild (and often contradictory) spending schemes, and imposing lots of harmful regulations – he was NOT saying that every farm, ranch, shop, factory (and so on) in the United States should be under state control.
I’m afraid I don’t lament the loss of Greek and Latin. They really don’t serve much purpose outside of some specialized areas. And dead languages are dead. Modern Greek is barely mutually understandable with, for example, Attic Greek.
Regarding languages, it seems to me that British schools are rather out of step. Generally speaking (when I was there anyway) they taught French. And, with no disrespect to our Francophone friends, I am not at all sure it is a great choice. In the US the default tends to be Spanish which is a really useful language to speak here in the US, and internationally it is one of the most widely spoken languages. (I wonder what they teach in AusNz? Or South Africa? Fun fact, South Africa is the country with the most languages used in their national anthem — five in total, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Afrikaans and English.)
But I think the purpose of language acquisition is rather more than just learning a foreign language, but also to learn more about language and how it works. from that perspective learning a language very like English (as both French and Spanish are) only serves that goal to a limited degree. I suggest learning Mandarin in the schools. It is certainly a useful commercial language, and is so dramatically different from English that there is huge learning in that alone.
For most non Anglophones the choice of a first second language is obvious — English — for anglophones I think it is rather a harder choice, which is why we have an appallingly low rate of foreign language acquisition.
For Americans though, I think Spanish is probably the right default choice.
Sí, Espanol es muy valioso saberlo. 😉
It is also worth discussing British & American universities in the 1930: we don’t want to wait another decade for that!
We could start by discussing the Nazi sympathies of the Ivy League. And then there was that debate at the Oxford Union…
WRT Latin & Greek, my theory is that, initially, they were studied in order to read the Classics in the original; and the Classics were read because they inspired a “spirit of liberty” (which is why Hobbes wanted them banned… even Plato, whom we hardly consider a libertarian today!)
My theory goes on to surmise that, gradually, the study of the Classics became an end in itself. Which is why i believe that, today, a spirit of liberty is best obtained by reading the Sagas of Icelanders; or just watching Westerns.
The Classics are still worth reading, but the vast majority of people won’t read them; and, for the vast majority of the small minority who reads them, reading translations is more rational than learning to read in Latin & Greek.
In New Zealand the most popular second language is Maori. A whole new generation is now coming through who have it to fluency.
The numbers taking French, Spanish, German etc is trivial. What’s the point for most people? We don’t live near those countries, and we trade in English.
There was a push a while back to teach more Mandarin, but given the large number of Kiwis who already have it to fluency, why would a non-ethnic Chinese bother?
Fraser Orr said:
This is one of those moments when I facepalm, so damn hard.
You really, truly need to “lament the loss of Greek and Latin”, but because you’ve missed the entire point of an actual Classical education, it is literally Greek to you.
The languages themselves aren’t the problem; what is the problem with their deliberate de-emphasis is how much of our cultural patrimony is now locked away, unintelligible.
That’s what you should lament.
If you go back digging through the foundational papers of our modern world, they were all written by men whose command of Greek and Latin was such that they continually and egregiously sprinkled those languages through their writings and thoughts, being unable to conceive of the thoughts in plain English. That’s not exactly accidental, either. The ideas that they had almost had to be expressed in Greek and Latin, because English simply lacked the faculty for it.
I spent many an hour working my way through the Federalist Papers and other sources, back before the Internet. Huge pain in the ass, and one that made me simultaneously sad and angry that I’d never been able to take either Greek or Latin in my benighted rural school districts. There’s a hell of a lot there that’s simply inaccessible because of all the allusion and reference to things that were commonplace for the Founders. Absent that, it’s a trip through the damn dictionaries, where you have to rely on the authority and probity of the translators in question. Were you fluent in Greek and Latin? You’d be able to wrap your head around the arguments yourself, first-hand. They’re a hell of a lot more convincing, when you’re not having to run to the dictionary or commentary every time one of those great minds lapses into classical mode.
Frankly, I think the loss of Greek and Latin was a deliberate sabotage of our educational system, meant to separate us from the meat of our culture. I don’t think it was done in a fit of absent-mindedness, either: It was done deliberately and with malice aforethought. They never should have done it.
But, it’s like so much of modern academia. None of it is taught with any real reverence or respect for the material; math is totally divorced from most of its uses in the real world, disconnected from any reason “why” students should learn it. It’s presented like one of those silly-ass “Find-a-Word” puzzles that so delight the tiny minds teaching primary school grades, in isolation and like a stupid game. Not a tool for understanding the world.
Greek and Latin should still be taught, if only so we can understand what the hell our forebears were saying and thinking when they wrought our political system.
@Kirk
This is one of those moments when I facepalm, so damn hard.
I made the mistake of reading your reply. It never ceases to amaze me how rude and unpleasant you are. I tell myself not to read your comments, but when my name is at the top, I can’t help myself. Like rubbernecking on the freeway.
FWIW, I have a pretty decent faculty reading ancient Greek (Koine rather than Attic, but they aren’t much different). I can assure you there are no ideas you can express in Greek that you cannot express in English. The only major features of Greek missing in English I can think of are a few verb forms like the optative, subjective (which English has but rarely uses), and certain aspects like the aorist. And maybe some features that are common in modern languages like gendered nouns and pro drop pronouns. But all of them can be expressed in English with a few auxiliaries. If you doubt this I suggest you look at the New American Standard Translation of the Greek New Testament, which has excruciatingly pedantic translations of Greek verb tenses.
As to allusions in the founding fathers’ writings or supposedly inaccessible “cultural patrimony”, AFAIK every known significant Greek and Latin manuscripts is available in an excellent English translation. So, if you really think there is some advantage to knowing, for example, the terrible ideas in Plato’s Republic, or the unappealing stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, you are perfectly able to read them with all their subtlety fully manifest. You’ll learn FAR more about them reading them in English than you would by struggling through in some schoolboy’s half assed Greek or Latin.
And as with everything, if you spend large amounts of time studying these languages it is time taken away that you can be studying vastly more useful things, including, for example, classical texts translated into English, insofar as that is useful (which I’m inclined to say, generally, it is not.)
I’d sooner send my kids to school to study COBOL and Fortran as dead languages than Greek or Latin.
I’m thinking that classical language was a good choice back when 2% of the proper-aged kids from wealthy homes were sent to college. It was a luxury make-work thing, done for status. It might be useful to society to have 1% of the population possess such knowledge. Maybe.
In current society, it becomes a waste of resources to spend the time and money to send millions of kids through it. Sure, it might make them more civilized and aware of old society, but there are much better ways to spend that precious time as we first enter adulthood.
The physics of welding, or world history, for instance . . .
BTW, apologies, I misspelled subjunctive above as subjective… which is very embarrassing.
@bobby b
I’d sooner send my kids to school to study COBOL and Fortran as dead languages than Greek or Latin.
You’d be surprised how much software is still written and supported in COBOL and Fortran. For example, one of the most important mathematical libraries used by just about everyone who does advanced math on computers is called the NAG library, all written in Fortran, and an old version of fortran to boot. It is a hugely successful commercial product that nobody dares touch because it is imbued with 60 years of mathematical expertise, edge cases and exactitude. I used it one time at a big chemical company to do very precise and careful chemical reaction calculations.
Most people, including me, don’t speak Fortran, so, if you do, and they really need a Fortran guy, you are in for a big paycheck.
To avoid being ripped off?
@Fraser Orr: Have to admit, in order to make that comment, I had to go to Google and search “obsolete computer languages.” Those were the first two languages that I even recognized.
But that does work with my point that some very small subset of humanity can do well learning old dead languages – but it’s not what I would include in a general liberal arts education.
(Of course, I’m a huge fan of Mike Rowe, and tech schools and trade schools, for the masses.)
Yeah, and I’m the primitive.
You simply do not get it, at all. The important thing is the context and what the meanings are, the ones the writers meant when they used them.
You can’t get that out of a simple translation, without fluency in the languages as they were understood at the time of the writer. I’ve been through half-a-dozen different translations of the same passages cited by one of the Founders, and discovered that the actual translations used as cites were different enough to change the entire meaning of the passage. As a non-fluent Greek or Latin speaker, you’re forced to trust the translation. Which, as anyone who has dug into the background of the King James version of the Bible, can be a bit of a risk.
What you are completely missing is just how much of the cultural patrimony there is invested in those languages. You can’t actually go back and even get too far into the 18th and 19th Century literature without either spending a hell of a lot of time digging into what each quote meant through translations, or you miss huge swathes of what the writers were saying.
It’s a huge cultural blindspot, and one that was created deliberately with the dumbing down of education. Most kids today aren’t even exposed to the very rudiments of any of this, and it’s like cursive writing: If you’ve never learned it, you can’t read it. If you can’t read it, then kiss goodbye to half the historical record or more, inside your own family documents.
There are arguments to be made about these things, but I honestly cannot think of any convincing ones for no longer even having these languages on the curriculum. How much of English grammar and vocabulary is borrowed from Latin, grafted on? You can’t even begin to make sense of a lot of English spelling without having the context of knowing where and from what language the word was taken. Most people just mock the spelling rules and so forth, saying our ancestors were simply silly, silly people. But, if you look at the actual deep background…? It makes sense.
They never teach it that way, however. It’s all just mockery, mockery, mockery, “We so smart… Silly ancestors…”
So much of the problem with modern “education” is that it’s all out of context, out of order for rational and easy understanding.
The gaps in what they teach, like the de-emphasis on Greek and Latin? That’s all of a piece with the whole program the Progressives put in place with education. If you can separate a people from its history, you’ve effectively killed their culture, making it easier to replace.
Which, I fear, has been the primary goal for most of these “reformers”.
British Universities in the 1920’s and 1930’s were conservative, eh?
Anyone recognise these names?
Guy Burgess
Donald Maclean
Kim Philby
Anthony Blunt
John Cairncross.
No, they had degenerated into an intellectual echo chamber and had taken on the “exciting” and novel ideas of Marxism and Communism. hence the cambridge five.
“Conservative” means whatever the speaker wants it to, these days. Nazi, Christian, White, Right-wing, whatever… Never mind that the actuality of what they’re using as an epithet was something from their own side.
The irony is how many so-called “Fascists” started out from “Socialist”.
The functionally insane can be identified by the faculty with which they keep changing labels on everything. There’s a certain organizational dysfunction and confusion endemic to their thought processes: Today, the Fascists are our good allies in freeing Poland; tomorrow, they’re dire enemies we must exterminate! You talk to a “true believer”, and what you’re going to find is that they’re all constantly checking in with either a literal or a figurative “Party Headquarters” in order to find out what or who they’re supposed to be hating, this week.
If neither their enemies or their terms are fixed? You’re dealing with a nutter, plain and simple.
There was a push a while back to teach more Mandarin, but given the large number of Kiwis who already have it to fluency, why would a non-ethnic Chinese bother?
Because you’re part of the global government movement? If you are interested in trade, you’d be speaking Cantonese, not the language of the north city bureaucrats.
More likely because the advocates for learning Chinese don’t actually know the difference, and have only ever heard of Mandarin.
You talk to these types, and it becomes amazingly clear that they’re not really all that knowledgeable about many of the things they advocate for. It sounds good, it makes them look smart, but…? There ain’t no “there” actually there.
Odds are pretty good that Mandarin or Cantonese will likely be of very limited utility to anyone not actually living in China. Assuming that the demographic trends go on the way they are, along with the economic ones. China is literally running on fumes, and if they manage to navigate all their self-caused problems, it’s gonna be interesting to see what’s left.
Everyone talking “China”, and saying “lern u sum Man-reen”? They’re the same idjits who were saying that “Japan, Inc.” was going to rule the world, and that we should all learn Japanese…
@Kirk
Yeah, and I’m the primitive.
I didn’t say that. “Primitive” has a certain nobility to it. Rude and unpleasant are just a character flaws.
You simply do not get it, at all. The important thing is the context and what the meanings are, the ones the writers meant when they used them.
Right. That is why you need an expert translator. Which is what you have at the local Barnes and Noble. What? Have you changed positions from everyone should have some lessons in Latin and Greek to everyone must be a expert in these languages? Do you really think you need to be an expert in Greek and Latin to understand the Federalist papers or our form of government? That seems to be your argument.
You can’t translate at that level, to understand some subtle differences in the original (for example, the fact that some words mean different things in different places and at different times) or linguistic context without being a profound expert. If you really need to get into the intricacies (which you rarely do) then your approach of reading multiple translations is a good one. Your idea that you should learn the language to an expert level to read it in the original is just plain ridiculous.
There are arguments to be made about these things, but I honestly cannot think of any convincing ones for no longer even having these languages on the curriculum.
Having a vague passing knowledge of these languages does not at all achieve what you are asking. In fact when it comes to language a little knowledge is a very dangerous thing.
How much of English grammar and vocabulary is borrowed from Latin, grafted on?
None, or very little. English grammar is Anglo Saxon watered down by Norse and modified with Norman French. The only Latin grammar we have was grafted on by some self important blowhards in the 18th and 19th century who decided to make English more difficult by adding in some random Latin grammar. That is why there is a b in debt, and why you some disapprove of splitting an infinitive or ending a sentence with a preposition.
You can’t even begin to make sense of a lot of English spelling without having the context of knowing where and from what language the word was taken.
Again this is deeply misleading. English words come mostly from Anglo Saxon or Norman French. Some Greek and Latin came in via French (and a lot of neo Latin coined to name technologies and science), but this has little impact on the spelling except in a few special cases. English spelling is a mess because it is a hybrid language — a denuded Anglo Saxon because of the Viking raids and the hegemony of French after the Norman conquest; because the great vowel shift took place while we were just starting to print books, and because of the interfering busybodies I mentioned above who decided to put in lots of silent letters all over the place because of their obsession with the importance of Latin. Does the plural of “focus” from from Latin? Yes it does. Does the plural of “bacterium” come from Greek? Yes it does. But the traditional plural form in 99% of words comes from Anglo Saxon denuded by Norse. And there are far more “exceptions” that come from Anglo Saxon than come from Latin or Greek. FWIW, for a highly inflected language like Latin (and Greek also) the only noun inflection left in English is ‘s, which is called “the Saxon genitive”. Guess where that comes from.
Spanish is FAR closer to Latin than English, and it has extremely regular spelling. So any claim that Latin is the source of our spelling mess is plainly not true.
Did you know that one of the most difficult grammar points for ESL speakers is the correct use of the definite article “the”? Did you also know there is no definite article in Latin? That (literally) came from Anglo Saxon and in fact used to be spelled þe.
OK, I’m tired or your uneducated ranting.
Given that many people seem to think it is reasonable for their children to learn to play an instrument, or one of the large number of sports, neither of which will be of any use in almost all careers, why would learning e.g. Latin be any different? Indeed, Latin can be useful for learning some modern languages. So long as people fund it themselves (and this often does not happen with music or sports), I cannot see a problem.
While everything can be expressed in English which can be expressed in Latin, what to express may be a more difficult matter to figure out. Why would there be so many translations of classical texts if it was totally clear what they meant? But regardless, I don’t really think that classics are all that useful for learning about ideas necessarily. I just think it is more fun to read authors such as Virgil, Cicero and Homer (not Caesar though) in the original than in some tedious English translation. The ideas may be expressible, but the form is not.
By the way, Fraser, why did you bother learning Koine Greek? I assume it was for New Testament translation, but couldn’t you use one of the (many) existing translations? I am seriously wondering, not making an argument.
I learned Middle English simply so I could read Canterbury Tales in the original language. I got so much more of the humor and wit of Chaucer by reading the actual words he used than I got in reading the translated versions. There simply is something lost in translation, especially when one considers the intent or subtle biases , intentional or not, of the translator seeping in. It has to be no different when reading a philosopher from the Greek or Roman eras in their original languages.
Kirk: I did actually learn Japanese in the ’80s as it was the language de jour that was touted as The Future(tm). For a few years I ended up teaching English to Japanese people who were living in Hong Kong. :p
This all seems a bit tetchy.
Two comments-
Classics were fun. A hell of a lot more fun than Physics-which was rote learning plus some simple maths;
It’s very hard to tell what maths will be useful.
Latin squares turned out to be very handy in designing agricultural experiments.
Stochastic differential equations turned out to be just what quants needed. Studying prime numbers gave us the RSA algorithm which underlies most modern encryption (he oversimplified).
Fraser: Having dabbled in foreign languages a bit, and having spent decades copy editing English written by authors with many different native languages, I think that if you want a language structurally different from English, Japanese is an even better bet than Chinese. At least judging by how strange the syntax of English sentences written by native speakers of the respective languages can become.
Though a strongly inflected language, such as Greek, Russian, or Sanskrit, will also offer interesting challenges to speakers of an all but uninflected language such as English.
Fraser: English has a grammatical distinction that corresponds to that between the imperfect and the aorist (or, in Spanish, between the imperfect and the preterite). In the sentence “Yesterday I was going to the park and I saw a group of protesters,” the verb form “was going” suggests an ongoing past state and the verb form “saw” expresses a momentary event, with the former being the context for the latter; the former is functionally analogous to the imperfect. I think current grammarians call the former the past progressive and the latter the simple past.
In my experience, American English speakers use forms of the subjunctive much more often than British English speakers, to the point that in reading text from British sources I regularly encounter odd looking word choices—”that he goes” where I would say “that he go,” and so on.
Though older British texts often have the subjunctive. When Kipling writes, for example, “Whether the People be led by the Lord/Or lured by the loudest throat,” the “be” is a subjunctive expressing a supposition that may not be true; when he adds, “These are things we have dealt with once/(And they will not rise from their grave),” he’s making a definite statement. I didn’t grasp that when I first encountered “MacDonough’s Song” in my early teens and so I didn’t get the nuances of the poem. (Because even in American English the subjunctive is less used than formerly.)
Unfortunately, the simple past is not exactly equivalent to the aorist, since the aorist does not always refer to past time. The gnomic aorist, for instance, refers to a general case without particular reference to time.
Clovis says,
“A hell of a lot more fun than Physics-which was rote learning plus some simple maths.”
I say “bollocks”. There is very little rote learning in university level physics. The maths isn’t simple either.
Fraser is right that Fortran and COBOL aren’t exactly dead. Nobody would conceive a clean sheet program with them nowadays (Fortran is so archaic that some of the syntactic elements go back to punch cards). But there is a lot of stuff already written in them. Grizzled COBOL programmers made a mint coming out of retirement for the “Millenium Bug”.
@NickM
Continuing tetchy, I see.
We were, I thought, discussing school-level (in the UK sense) education.
A level Physics was easy and actually unscientific-in the sense that it was taught largely by rote, with very few practicals and yes, I obtained an A1 (the 1 referring to the special level paper)-which is not to brag but simply to say my use of “boring” did not connote a lack of understanding.
I agree with your comments re University-level Physics, but that was not my point “as any fule kno” [maybe we could keep the tetchy a little more light-hearted].
I certainly do not remember any rote learning in high-school Physics (in Italy). No calculus, for sure, but i remember that i had previously been more interested in Zoology, and yet i started to suffer from “Physics envy”. Not Geometry envy, because i felt that Geometry does not deal with the real world.
But my main point is about the Classics being fun. That is why i suspect that studying them in high school is counter-productive: because they are presented as sophisticated entertainment and, as bobby points out, a status symbol.
I note that already Machiavelli wrote in the Foreword of the Discorsi that his goal was to enable the reader to read the Roman historians with profit, rather than only with pleasure.
I was fortunate enough to go through excellent schools in Portland, Holy Redeemer (Catholic, grades 1-8) and Benson Polytechnic HS (grades 9-12). The curriculum at both is a hollow shell of what it was…and that’s just since the 1970s.
Bobby b: Mike Rowe would have LOVED Benson HS. All students took four shop classes their freshman and sophomore years (8 classes total). Machine shop, sheet metal, hydraulics, electronics, building construction (senior class built a house every year!), and many more. We learned to draft on vellum! We then “majored” in one area; I chose electronics. My biggest regret: never took welding.
But in one of those schools, I learned “Greek and Latin roots” as part of my grammar education. I’m guessing it was the nuns who taught me that! Extremely helpful…even if now faded to obscurity in my daily reading of whatever! So, yes, the teaching of Greek and Latin was absent, but not the foundations of our language in those “dead” languages. Like many “dead” things, they live on in some form!
WRT Cantonese vs Mandarin: an acquaintance of mine from Hong Kong told me that there is no written Cantonese: “We write in Mandarin.”
What I take from all this is that universities were always useless, they just used to be useless in different ways.
@Ken Hagler
What I take from all this is that universities were always useless, they just used to be useless in different ways.
That’s not true at all. Without Universities we wouldn’t have doctors or lawyers or engineers or scientists. We also wouldn’t have large swaths of technology that were invented there, such as some of the technologies you use to access this very website.
Universities as centers of learning and research are one of the pillars of the enlightenment and the modern world, which is why it is even more tragic that they have been poisoned into the dreadful state they are today.
I have a friend whose son is about to graduate from a prestigious university with a perfect GPA in premed, top of his class, a spectacular resume, an excellent MCAT score, but he is finding it really hard to find a spot in medical school. Why? Because he is a white, heterosexual male.
Good to know our doctors of the future will be diverse even if not academically qualified.
Patrick Crozier says my comment implies that higher education was once much better. That’s not right. I’m sure the sector has had its share of craziness over the decades, or centuries. And it’s much bigger. Part of this is driven by credentialism and the increases requirement of degrees for jobs that didn’t used to require them. There’s also been a massive state-driven growth of the sector, which I explicitly criticised.
But no form of “whataboutism” is going to blunt the force of criticism of where we now are. Are there forms of excellence in higher education today? I’m sure there are. Given what’s spent, that’s not expecting much.
Late to the party, but – what Fraser Orr said. There’s very few concepts that truly are incapable of being adequately expressed in English, but only readily grasped in the ‘original’ Greek or Latin – and this is speaking as a a very-fair reader of Latin, even now. For the longest time, ease and facility with Latin and Greek was used, not as an adjunct to learning and understanding, but as a lingua-franca of class distinction and exclusion. In many ways, the obsession with referring back to Greek and Latin writings acted as an intellectual limiter, making it difficult to express new and different ideas for which there was no suitable ‘classical’ reference or elegantly-turned ‘tag’ with which to impress one’s peers. The insistence that the only way to truly grasp and understand the basic elements of civilization was to do so in the ‘original’ tongues is rather-akin to the religious ideas that the liturgy is only ‘real’ in Latin, or in the original ‘Arabic’.
Lots of good ideas in the original texts, but they were (are) certainly not the be-all and end-all of civilized thought, and all are easily-enough translated with complete comprehensibility into many (not all) modern languages. I’m not sorry I learned to read Latin quite well, it certainly increased my enjoyment of other writings, but I don’t think it added anything at all to my intellectual development.
llater,
llamas
@Jonathan Pearce
Strongly agree. It’s dire. Maths is holding on (in the UK anyway) but the barbarians are at the gates [I recently noticed a glossy poster for “DEI in the mathematical sciences- a symposium”]. Physics ditto.
Universities have had long periods of not being that good, but this is the first where nearly 50% of the young go to one. That makes it much worse in terms of the impact.
Kirk,
I like reading what you have to say. Please don’t stop writing here.
Exactly, Clovis. I take little comfort from how students and lecturers were bad in the past. I don’t believe there was any golden age. But..given the size of higher education today, it’s in a position to be a lot more damaging.
When I was at university in the mid 70s my middle aged tutor questioned the wisdom of the recent 1960s expansion of the university system. He doubted it would expand further as there weren’t enough bright people to fill any new universities.
He lived to a great age, only dying 4 years ago, so he lived to see that he was wrong.
Actually, I think he was right. There weren’t enough bright students, but they just moved on to the mid-bright.
It’d be nice if “education” meant what it should, but these days? The actual value is sorely lacking.
The various universities have been turned into indoctrination centers teaching their students that everything that underpins Western civilization is bad and evil, replacing “dead white men” with DEI. The real problem here is that by doing this, they’re cutting the culture adrift, and the vandalism is being perpetrated by the very people who should be its guardians.
The argument over the supposed “dead languages of the past” is of a piece with this. Anyone wonder why the Jews are so cohesive, millennia after they were thrown out of their home country by the Romans and others? Ever consider that the glue holding them together was their “dead” language, Hebrew? The one that served as a touchstone for their identity and history? There are reasons the Jews managed what they did, in terms of retaining cultural identity in the face of untold forces militating against it all. Most of those have to do with language, having a common framework to work from… A Jew in Germany might speak Yiddish, or a variation thereof, but he could always rely on being able to communicate with one of his fellow Jews in Hebrew. This was one of their advantages in commerce throughout the Diaspora.
Greek and Latin served similar functions for Western civilization. The deliberate abandonment of their instruction should have served as a warning for all the other things that the Progressive types have done, in the name of “reform”. I’ll grant you that both languages are of limited utility in daily life, but the problem is that so much of our patrimony is recorded and expressed in them. You can’t easily grasp many of the allusions in a host of our culture’s seminal writings without at least a basic grounding in both languages. Hell, you need to be able to at least recognize there’s something there, that you need to look up and understand, as well as grasp that not all of the translations out there are trustworthy.
I don’t think everyone needs fluency, but they damn sure need to have enough people around that are fluent, in order to keep the translators and “interpreters” of the documentation from the Enlightenment clear and properly understood. If you go back and look at a lot of the crappy scholarship produced by characters like Bellisles regarding the Second Amendment, you’ll find time and time again that he deliberately obfuscates or misinterprets the classical references men like Jefferson used in correspondence discussing these issues. Leave enough of this as esoteric language that only a few specialists understand, and you’re leaving your culture open to being undermined by subterfuge and sabotage.
It may not be as important, going forward. Things like Google Lens make it very easy to translate such texts, but how much do you want to trust machine translation?
If nothing else, you should be concerned that they’re not even teaching either of these languages as electives, anymore. It’s a loss, just like the fact that my nephews and niece can’t read the cursive most of our family papers are written in. “Oh, they don’t need handwriting, any more… Teach them to keyboard, instead…”
This whole thing is rather like the way they’ve done away with the card catalogs in most libraries. Yeah, they’re archaic and quaint, but those racked catalogs contained a hell of a lot of value in terms of notes and other things collected down the years. As well, it was a more honest resource; today’s electronic catalogs are all too amenable to being edited and then used as justification for “de-accessioning” controversial works by the various “woke” library science types. You really don’t want to know what all got pulped in the last thirty years, or so. Some of that material will never be seen again, let alone be accessible to the public. It’s all just a key-click away from erasure by someone with the right credentials.
I grew up among genuinely educated people. Most of the people with similar credentials today are nothing more than credentialed barbarians, who have been cut free from all the “impedimentia” that we used to consider as crucial to a full liberal education. The majority of them can’t even identify allusions to Greek mythology, or wrap their heads around all the various Latin abbreviations that we use. It’s astounding to run into primary-level teachers that can’t spell, and who have no idea that things like the ampersand have their roots in Latin.
The majority of the problem, I fear, is that we teach everything without any of the underlying antecedant contributors. You can’t understand the rationale behind English spelling and reading without understanding where it all comes from, and how the whole system works.
Valuable little book that lays out all the things they didn’t teach you about English:
Uncovering The Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy by Denise Eide.
This book is to English spelling and a lot of other supposed English “foibles” what learning the actual uses of formula are to Algebra. Once you’ve stepped through the looking-glass, it all starts to make sense, but the damned education system we have strives to leave everyone on the outside looking inwards, in confusion…
First off… It is odd that there is a discussion here on the value of learning the languages of the toga-wearers being carried out in English. Odd, that.
Second. I know the barbarians are at the gates of science and maths… I know that. They weren’t when I was a student in the ’90s. Yeah, for sure the school of the huge manatees and the departments of the farts and shitterature had long been awoken but who cares? Does anyone give a fuck? Really?
Like that has ever mattered a flying-fuck in any way shape or form. Unless it involves learning calculus or the structure of a language (modern or computer) education is just wank. Does anyone give a toss about “Modern Studies”? The vast majority of arts and “anti-social” graduates aren’t even fit to shovel shit from one place to another.
The World would be a much better place if these tossers were just ignored and left to frig themselves to death on a blasted heath.
@Kirk
The argument over the supposed “dead languages of the past” is of a piece with this. Anyone wonder why the Jews are so cohesive, millennia after they were thrown out of their home country by the Romans and others? Ever consider that the glue holding them together was their “dead” language, Hebrew?
I don’t know where you get this stuff, but this just simply isn’t true. Hebrew was until very recently a religious language primarily, not a day to day, do your groceries, chat at the water cooler language.
Even during Roman occupation of Judea the Jews spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew. Hebrew was maintained through the ages by scholars, and most Jews throughout history didn’t know much Hebrew at all save various prayers and recitations, for example, the Shema: “Shema Yisrael, HaShem, Elohenu, HaShem echad.” Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. (From Deuteronomy/Devarim 6:4)
This paragraph might be too detailed for most so feel free to skip it, but it does make a point about the place of Hebrew in pre-modern Jewish society. I give the transliteration here because it is important and illustrative of this point. The word LORD is English is a translation of a special word in the Hebrew often called the tetragrammaton (which literally means “four letters”). It is traditionally translated in English as LORD in capital letters but that isn’t what the word actually means. It is considered a personal name of God, sometimes given as YHWH or Jehovah in English, and it is traditionally considered too holy a word to pronounce. So they use a technique called Kitiv/Quere meaning written/read because it is read differently that it is written. Often in Hebrew it is read out loud as Adonai, the standard Hebrew word for “Lord” hence the English translation, but it is often read also as HaShem, which means “The Name”. I’m not Jewish but I have only ever heard the Shema read with the tetragrammaton as HaShem. (Obviously all of the above are approximate transliterations of the corresponding Hebrew words — Hebrew has a very different alphabet and vowel system.)
So what does all this tedious detail mean? Simply that the words of the Torah were taken very seriously, they were sanctified by the Jewish people, their scribes and rabbis. So the idea that they would use it while chatting over a beer at the pub is just ridiculous.
Although Hebrew is now a day to day language in Israel this only happened early in the last century as part of Zionism, and if you take the time to research the history of it there was actually quite a bit of resistance to its use among the Zionist Jews, certainly in part because it was considered a desecration to use the holy language for secular purposes.
So this idea that Hebrew united the Jewish diaspora just isn’t true. It is a good question to ask why, despite everything, Jews have been so historically successful. I certainly have some ideas about this, but it seems rather off topic.
Greek and Latin served similar functions for Western civilization.
Latin and to some extent French served as a lingua franca among the ruling classes, the priesthood and the scientific community, Greek not so much. It was only important insofar as it served to give access to the classics in Greek, because that was considered important.
The deliberate abandonment of their instruction should have served as a warning for all the other things that the Progressive types have done, in the name of “reform”.
You seem to suggest that they were abandoned as part of some conspiracy. That isn’t true. Rather. they outlived their usefulness. it is no coincidence that they began to diminish in importance as English began its global linguistic hegemony.
but the problem is that so much of our patrimony is recorded and expressed in them.
As I have already said that “patrimony” insofar as it is useful is readily available in most modern languages.
You can’t easily grasp many of the allusions in a host of our culture’s seminal writings without at least a basic grounding in both languages.
That’s not true for two reasons — firstly it underestimates the ability of translators to bring out this allusion, and secondly because having a basic grounding does nothing along these lines — to understand the subtleties of the language requires expertise not a basic grounding.
The majority of them can’t even identify allusions to Greek mythology, or wrap their heads around all the various Latin abbreviations that we use. It’s astounding to run into primary-level teachers that can’t spell, and who have no idea that things like the ampersand have their roots in Latin.
But why are those things important? Isn’t it equally astonishing that the educated people you grew up with didn’t know the difference between https or http? Or didn’t know how to deposit a check with their phone?
Why does it matter if you don’t know what QED is an abbreviation for as long as you understand what it means? Do you know what https stands for? Did you know it was an abbreviation? Does it matter at all that most people don’t know? I’m an expert in that area so I do know. But I know so that they don’t have to. You are an expert in military matters, which I am not. You are an expert so that I don’t have to be.
The majority of the problem, I fear, is that we teach everything without any of the underlying antecedant contributors. You can’t understand the rationale behind English spelling and reading without understanding where it all comes from, and how the whole system works.
Says the man who just a few posts ago demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of the origins of English grammar and vocabulary! You most certainly don’t have to know the whys and wherefores of why tools like language are the way they are as long as you can use them. Again, here you are on a browser, do you know how the text gets on your screen? Do you know the people and history behind the decisions that made it the way it is? If you do, good for you, but 99.99% of people who use browsers haven’t got a clue. However, apparently they can utilize all that amazing complexity quite easily.
After years of neglecting my own blog I started contributing at Chicago Boyz recently. My first post offered an introduction to a key influence over anti-Western/anti-Israeli attitudes in American academia: Edward Said. As stated in the post, Said was yet another voice that painted the West as “history’s greatest aggressor;” his influential book Orientalism shaped the framework of Middle Eastern studies in the US. The antisemitism of the left is an outgrowth of anti-Westernism; it views Israel as a European colony usurping Arab land. It ultimately views the US as an illegitimate state as well.
I have studied mathematics (I consider mathematics to be as much a language as English, with different letters, words, and punctuation marks – all meant to represent the same reality, seen and unseen) up to Trigonometry.
I make extensive use of basic mathematics (addition & subtraction, multiplication & division), see algebra as a way to form complex sentences that lead different variable to a unifying solution – and even see algebra as leaning into bookkeeping and accounting, don’t use geometry but see how it can be used everyday, and used the quadratic equation inadequately when I did use it – and that was a long time ago.
I learned the language of mathematics and have enjoyed the opportunity to try it out and see how much of it I needed and need.
I am working on a personal project that involves reading the lectures William Frederic Chambers, physician to Queen Adelaide, King William IV, Queen Victoria, and her mother, gave to the students at St. George’s Hospital in 1832 about the outbreak of Cholera in cities like Exeter and Newcastle.
He quotes bits of Hippocrates, and the 5th Century AD Roman writer Caelius Aurelianus extensively. It is a gorgeous piece of prose, a ripping yarn. I have to be content with the probably 85% accurate translation I get from painstaking use of Google Translate.
I had no idea in grade school I would be doing this silly thing in such earnest.
No one has any idea when children are in school, least of all their teachers or parents, what those children will be doing as adults, what knowledge they will want, what they will need, what they will have to settle for 85% satisfaction that they are getting it right.
Teach them the “Dead Languages”, and Mathematics, and let the children work out what they use as adults.
Hopefully they will learn that people who angrily and arrogantly speak of “Dead Languages” are fools who do not deserve to be paid heed to.
FadedAutographs
Teach them the “Dead Languages”, and Mathematics, and let the children work out what they use as adults.
There is a universe of knowledge that you could teach to kids in school and part of curriculum selection is to decide what they are most likely to use. Your need to do this translation might mean it would have been useful to you to learn Latin, but a perfectly viable alternative is either using google translate as you are using, or simply hiring an expert to do it for you, or learning it as an adult. I guarantee you far more people use, for example, Calculus daily than use Latin, and by no means do I think all kids should be taught Calculus.
Why not teach kids Tagalog, and COBOL, and medical bill coding? They are all languages of a sort too. No doubt more people use those languages in their day to day lives than use Attic Greek.
Please, let’s not forget about that most expensive and most neglected of economic concepts: opportunity cost.
This. I can spend my time learning dead languages – and I’d need to learn them well and in depth – and then I can read out that last 15% of Homer et al.
Or, I can learn the language of medicine – bio, chem, math, etc – and use that learning as a doc. Or, I can learn the language of physics – math, run some balls down an inclined plane, etc. – and be a physicist. Or I can learn the language of engineering – or welding – or . . .
The rewards for learning dead languages seem slight in comparison.