YOU COULD knock me down with a fascis 1. In an effort to make GCSE classics more popular, the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) examiners are cutting the number of Latin and Greek words pupils need to learn. Latin is down from 550 words to 450 and Greek from 500 to 365. Ken Boston, the Whitehall quangocrat overseeing word-count targetry, approves. He thinks it is a great idea.

Such moments offer a stunning insight into the modern Whitehall brain. Hey Trace, says Darren in Curriculums, let’s crack this Latin thing. I reckon we can cut a hundred Latin words, from abacus to gratis, and still give kids A* if they can remember 400. That means we can give an A grade for 200 words, B for 100 and E if anyone can tell his retina from his rectum. As for Greek, let’s make it 365 words, which is one for each day of the year. Should be enough for OffToff’s Balliol entry quota.

Trace had been complaining for days that Kev in supplies did not catch half the words in Gladiator or Troy. She reckoned she could get Darren’s 450 down to 300 if IT could send up enough marker fluid. Meanwhile Darren was struggling to cut the number of words in French and German but was having trouble with the Foreign Office. As for English his Cabinet Office target was 1,250, which should get Hamlet down to one Act. That would allow the minister to hit the Treasury’s Performance Delivery Indicator Target 056/005 more or less on the button and win them both a £5,000 Civil Service star-rating annual performance bonus.

Clearly Ruth Kelly’s arrival at education has sharpened the troops. Like train companies lengthening schedules to “improve” timekeeping, exam boards are shrinking knowledge to improve exam results. Primary maths will show better when the Government abolishes the superfluous number nine. It hopes to do away with long division on advice from the Health and Safety Executive. History targets should be more attainable when they drop a couple of centuries and geography can easily do without South America. As for the ongoing Shakespeare crisis, everyone knows he had far too many kings.

How the Government fixed the Latin and Greek targets remains a mystery. Why 135 Greek words and just 100 Latin? Does the Treasury only do Mandarin? And is the same approach really to be extended to English, where literacy targets are in disarray? Ms Kelly could well meet her Key Stage Three mission pledge by cutting back to three-letter words. She could easily ban all polysyllables. Words beginning with H could go, as discriminating against Essex. The definite article could go as anti-Yorkshire. Then, as Yossarian cried in Catch 22, death to all qualifiers. Today no adverbs, tomorrow no adjectives, the next day no vowels. All GCSE papers could be txtmsgd.

I studied classics to A level. I found them enjoyable, irrelevant and a dreadful cost to my wider education, which I have struggled to rectify ever since. I never heard Byron’s “soft bastard Latin that melts like kisses from a female mouth”. Unlike Churchill I did not regard “Latin as an honour and Greek as a treat”. But one thing that never occurred to me was that I was studying a subject held by government in contempt. I was never patronised by a curricular bean-counter in Whitehall. These were majestic languages, not pidgins concocted by some OCR bird-brain with the attention span of a Berlitz phrasebook.

Nowhere is the collapse of British scholarship so complete as here. Exam papers cannot lie. I had to compose whole passages in Latin and Greek at 15. At A level the examiners demanded texts of Macaulay to be translated into Thucydidean Greek and Gladstone speeches into Ciceronian Latin, with no dictionaries. The precursor of Ms Kelly’s miserable apparatchik expected me to translate Wordsworth’s On Westminster Bridge into Latin hexameters. That is inconceivable today, and has been ever since the Government nationalised the curriculum in the 1980s. The subtle cadences of Greek and the rhythmic complexity of Latin are lost. (Such is my fury that I am inclined to reply from Henry Beard’s admirable new lexicon, “Tete fututure, te saluto” 2.)

The collapse is not just in quality. It is in central government’s faith in schools as autonomous institutions of education. Ever since Margaret Thatcher, syllabus reforms, schools, their teachers and parents have been treated as unfit to decide what is a liberal education. Politicians decide instead. And since Ms Kelly and her officials cannot micro-manage what goes on in every classroom, they must have other means of control. This means targets, league tables and quantifiability, as in the required number of Latin and Greek words. What cannot be counted does not matter to Ms Kelly.

These regulators are like Great War generals, swilling port in the château far from the trenches, sharing jokes with their staff officers and watching figures on maps. They lead not by inspiration but by numbers. How many gerunds did we send over the top today? Were they fully supported by past participles? Let’s switch a hundred irregular verbs to the vocative and shoot all ablative absolutes on sight. The Latins and Greeks are weakening. Cut their numbers to give them room for manoeuvre.

This is how standards decline. Why learn 470 Latin words if Ms Kelly will make Oxford admit you with just 450? Why read Greek literature when the Government will give you an A* for learning 365 words? Why bother to be an inspiring teacher, when Ms Kelly pays you only to count words and tick boxes? Why throw your heart and soul into running a school when higher authority has no trust in your professionalism? Come to that, why be a teacher at all when idiots like this are in charge?

1 straw rod, pl. fasces

2 “You who are about to go f*** yourselves, I salute you” (X-Treme Latin, Gotham)

simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk

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