Katie Lam: Why every child should have a ‘classical liberal education’ – and a Mr Bathurst

Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.

When I turned six, the thing I wanted more than anything in the world was a doll that ate and cried like a real baby. I hoped against hope that my great aunt Mary, my mother’s favourite aunt, might buy one for me for my birthday.

Instead, she gave me a copy of The Orchard Book of Greek Myths.

Whilst this was initially devastating, I soon came to love that book. I can still see it now if I close my eyes: poor Prometheus, who just wanted human beings to flourish and so brought them fire, punished by having his organs pecked out and regrown every day. Persephone, whose annual return from the underworld delighted her mother Demeter and so brought the start of spring. And Hope, fluttering away at the bottom of the box to comfort Pandora.

I thought the ancient world was magical.

So when I went to secondary school – the local comp, eight houses down the road – and was given a chance to learn Latin, I jumped at it. You could only learn Latin in Years 8 and 9, and even then only because Mr Bathurst insisted on being able to teach it. Mr Bathurst was the only remaining teacher who had been at the school when it was a girls’ grammar in the 1970s, and because he was a polymath (and, probably, because he was impossible to fire), taught many subjects like English, History, and RE, on the understanding that he could continue to do his four hours a week of Latin.

Instantly, I was hooked. It was like the best of English, the best of maths and the best of music: patterns, meaning, rhythm. I felt I understood my own language much better (not just knowing when to say “who” and when to say “whom”, but why), rapidly expanded my English vocabulary (Mr Bathurst was always telling us we could remember a piece of Latin vocab because it was the parent of an English word – just one we didn’t know yet), and unlocking some of the great stories that underpin our Western cultural inheritance.

I announced to my parents that I would have to study Classics at university, and so needed to learn Latin and Greek to GCSE outside school. Bless them, they took this in their stride (they were used to me by then), and so I did – ultimately going on to study Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, as Mr Bathurst had done forty years before me.

Were it not for Mr Bathurst and his determination that Latin should be available to those who wished to study it, wherever they may be, I would never have read Classics. Even though I was blessed with an exceptionally supportive family who had been to university themselves, without a teacher to start me off, I would never even have thought I could.

So it is particularly upsetting to see how this government, like Labour governments before them, is excelling in what George W. Bush once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. They have cut funding for a programme that enabled state school pupils to take GCSE Latin. They are cutting the English Baccalaureate. Lee Elliot Major, Britain’s first Professor of Social Mobility, is one of the key drivers of Labour’s curriculum review. He advised the government that “schools should reduce ‘middle-class activities’ such as museum and theatre trips”. He is wrong.

Museums and theatre are for everyone who wants to enjoy them; they do not belong to the middle class any more than poetry or music does.

This is not just a fundamental disagreement on principle: we know that Labour’s approach ends in failure.

For all its talk of “education, education, education,” the last Labour government before this one oversaw abysmal outcomes: early in that administration, in 2000, British children were ranked 7^th in the world in maths and 8^th in the world in reading. By the time Tony Blair left Downing Street, they had fallen to 26^th and 23^rd place respectively. Under the Conservatives, British schoolchildren shot back up the league tables – doing especially well in reading, rising to 4^th place.

There is no better start you can give children in life than teaching them to read, write and add. It is perverse that for all their talk of equality, Labour’s approach to education leaves state-educated children less able to succeed, and asserts that our great cultural jewels are the preserve of the wealthy.

Thankfully, theirs are not the only voices in the debate. Our shadow Education team – Laura Trott, Saqib Bhatti and Nick Timothy – take the fight to the Government every week and every day, highlighting Bridget Phillipson’s ideologically-driven vandalism of our education system and advocating tirelessly for the academies-and-free-schools model that has worked so remarkably well for our children.

And today Civitas is publishing an excellent new report on classical liberal education.

If you’re thinking, “what is classical liberal education”, don’t worry, the report sets it out: it is schooling focused on, “the cultivation of the human spirit; the grounding of a child into a lifelong adventure through ideas and ideals, that they might enter, through the gradual cultivation of wisdom, style and virtue, into the fullness of humanity”. “Its audacious goal” is “freedom – that, rather than mould us to the service of the state, education should instead fully develop our [own] capacities”.

The report observes, rightly dismayed, that, “it is still perfectly possible to pass through school, including with flying colours, having never picked up a work of classical literature, having never considered the nature of truth, without the basics of Western chronology, with not one line of poetry committed to memory.” I enjoyed my school days and loved many of my teachers, but this could fairly have been said of almost all my education – I only picked up any works of classical literature because of Mr Bathurst, and only learned any poetry by heart (having some poems you can say to yourself sometimes is one of life’s great pleasures) because my mum told me I should.

The report’s authors say all this “not to promote or indulge in a form of intellectual and social nostalgia but rather to pursue an approach that emphasises what really matters.” There was agreement in this country for hundreds of years about what it was most important for children to learn, and it saw us become one of the freest and wealthiest countries in the world, as well as binding us all together under a shared sense of our history, art and literature. It is arrogance of the highest order to assume this can all be chucked away in favour of teaching children things like “how to spot fake news” in “citizenship” classes – teach them reason and critical thinking on a path to wisdom, as the report advocates, and they will be able to spot fake news anyway.

This sort of education should not be available only to those whose parents can afford private school, or only to those (like me) with encouraging families and their own Mr Bathurst.

The Education Secretary would do well to leave the Conservative-bashing out of it and recognise what is best for our children.