Latin Inquiry

Extract

Latin is a wedding-garment no longer de rigueur for those entering Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Utility English jeans will in future be permissible wear. Whether this will herald a uniform change throughout the schools of the country it is early yet to say. The Crowther Committee was sure that Latin was taught in many cases merely as an insurance against possible debarment from the older universities. Whatever the truth of that, Latin will stand or continue to stand in the future by its own merits. Like Justice in the early part of the Republic, stripped of its adventitious rewards it may now lend itself to an impartial reappraisal. This seems to be the occasion for another stocktaking. Hard as it is to love gadflies, we perhaps should be grateful to those who stung us into these agonies of self-examination, so essential a condition of the good life. Stirrings indeed there have been. An impartial observer might comment that if Latin is a dead language, like Virgil's ox it appears to be the centre of a good deal of activity.