A long long time ago in the late 80s British private school education was the envy of the world. Smaller class sizes meant better student focus and a finely tuned streaming system meant that different levels could be tailored to differing abilities to ensure the weak could catch up and the elite could get even better. Fucking marvellous. Except my school set the levels (1 through 7) of all subjects on the students’ abilities at Latin. Your grasp of Latin was deemed to be a far better barometer for your abilities at Chemistry than for example, some sort of assessment of your abilities at Chemistry. If Louis Pasteur had rocked up at the school and didn’t know his vocative plural from his second declension it would have been a case of “Quel dommage Sunshine, you’re in with the special kids”. We were immediately categorised on our first day from 1-7. Set 1 were the mildly autistic bespectacled chess champions for whom Latin was simply another puzzle to take their minds off the weight of their parents’ expectations. Sets 2 through 6 were broadly the same as each other because it’s hard to subdivide 12 year old’s abilities in Latin that sharply. And I was cast in with the dumb-fucks of set 7 who hadn’t learned Latin before. However I, shame upon shame, had. I just thought it was pointless. I was right then and I’m right now. If your knowledge of Latin is above your knowledge of any spoken language, someone at some-point lied to you and owes you an explanation. Back then my Latin knowledge was non-existent as my brain correctly rejected it as soon as it got past my ears. I did however speak quite good French which infuriated my teachers as Latin was deemed superior. “French comes from Latin” I was told. “Just because I can ride a bike doesn’t mean I need to master a penny-farthing” I replied. Later in detention, while writing a history of the penny-farthing in Latin (denari-denari quartum???) I had lots of time to consider how right I was.
French class posed some issues. I’d spent the Summer months living in Paris without my parents (who evidently missed me during term time), with a family who didn’t’ speak English so quickly learned basic survival French. Our French teacher hadn’t left the school grounds in the last thirty years let alone been to France so our skills overlapped but didn’t match. He only had to cover set 7 anyway so two verses of Frere Jaque, counting to ten and ordering a ham sandwich usually got us through the hour. I learned three fifths of rein but possibly even less than Guillame next to me who was also flung into set 7 because Latin was not one of his three fluent languages. L’imbecile! That said, watching an English French teacher try and teach a French boy basic French is a rare treat few other than me and my classically challenged brethren have had the pleasure of witnessing. The best exchange was:
Sir: Tu compris?
Guillame: “Are you asking if I understood what you said or what you meant?”
History was also interesting because we were only taught about Britain’s successes. Crecy, Agincourt, Spanish Armada, Crimean, Waterloo, Boer, World War One, World War Two, Falklands – Questions?
Sir – Did we ever invade some countries? – Quite possibly, but only to help them out.
The French revolution was mentioned in passing but purely as a warning about the dangers of socialism.
New systems of teaching were rejected utterly as was any form of modernity. Our rulers displayed inches and our maps, Ceylon. Debate, critical thinking and opinion were shunned in favour of repetition, repetition or simply saying the same things over and over again. To this day I could list the dates for the events above but left the school not knowing why any of them happened beyond assuming it was the French’s fault. Which admittedly actually turned out to be true with several.
New technology was as bad as new systems. We had two computers that over two hundred boys shared. In fact if you sat down at a random keyboard at the school you had 33% greater chance of it being a harpsicord than a PC. Evidently we learned probability and percentages at some point too.
The one thing that we were taught that did prove useful was the following:
You are not special. Neither is anyone else so why shouldn’t it be you. The first bit was rammed down our throats for the first few years and we learned the rest along the way. The teachers themselves did their best to exemplify this theory by often being knowledgeable about their subject (if you repeat the same syllabus for 30 years the stuff has to start sinking in I suppose) but often quite appalling at you know, teaching. All this while commanding some of the highest salaries the profession offered. Didn’t matter. We had harpsicords.
Diaries of Boarding School 