Is it too little too late or just about time?
At a high-powered conference last week, the education ministers of France, Italy, Greece and Cyprus met in Paris to sign a new charter to promote the teaching of Latin and Ancient Greek languages. The goal is to reintroduce the classical languages into their respective education systems.
It is widely seen as a necessary move for young Europeans to rediscover the Western classics and return to the roots of their own civilisation. Politically, it is to counter the pernicious global influence of Anglo-American wokeness and political correctness.
According to the French press, Latin and Ancient Greek will be introduced into the classes of vocational schools from the sixth grade onwards as they are taught Sophocles and Plato. The more academic schools already offer such lessons.
Jean-Michel Blanquer, the French education minister, and his supporters have said the accord of the four countries is needed to counter woke culture. The New York Times quoted him as warning “against an intellectual matrix from American universities”.
This comes at a time when American and British universities are cancelling the teaching of the classics and their dead languages. In Canada, more than 4,700 books deemed “racist” were removed from the libraries of 30 schools in Ontario. A book burning was held in 2019 by the supervising school board.
Princeton University has just announced that students majoring in the classics will no longer need to study Latin and Ancient Greek. Wow, imagine getting a degree in Chinese literature without being able to read Chinese.
Howard University, one of America’s most prestigious universities traditionally serving black students, has got rid of its classics department altogether and reassigned tenured professors to other departments. Oxford University’s classics department wants to drop Homer and Virgil from its core syllabus.
In the 1980s, when I was an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in the United States, people were already rebelling against the Western classics, “the Great Books”, by dismissing them as written by “dead white European men”. Worse, those DWEM provided the literary and philosophical justifications for Western slavery, colonialism and white supremacy for 2,000 years.
Meanwhile, ageing professors at my school, most of them dead now, were trying to teach the Western canon as the foundation of their civilisation. They were already quaint in my time. Today, it’s woke academics, not old-fashioned scholars, who dominate Anglo-American higher education.
The conservative British philosopher John Gray recently wrote: “Wokery is … a singularly American world view. That may be why it has become a powerful force only in countries (such as Britain) heavily exposed to American culture wars. In much of the world – Asian and Islamic societies and large parts of Europe, for example – the woke movement is marginal, and its American prototype viewed with bemused indifference or contempt.”
I hope he is right. I love the Western classics, well, some of them anyway, and have been reading them all my life. They show me, in a good way, how insignificant and trivial any ideas I might have about anything are. More recently, I have started seriously reading the Chinese classics with which, embarrassingly, I am much less familiar.
The French, however, evidently fret that American wokeness is going global and is destroying high culture. Then again, they have always been paranoid about the spread of US influence from American nuclear bombs to American slang, Hollywood movies, McDonald’s and Starbucks, and the #MeToo movement. Whether or not the new classical language curriculum will help roll back wokeness remains to be seen. I rather doubt it.
But I don’t think it hurts any country to try to rediscover its cultural and civilisational roots. In Hong Kong, it has been a recent development but all the public universities now have some versions of the Chinese and Western Great Books, some of which are mandatory for undergraduates.
I am not sure forcing the Basic Law and national security law down the throats of Hong Kong’s rebellious youths would make them love China. Making them appreciate the Chinese classics might offer a better chance over time for them to discover or rediscover their own culture and civilisation. The French, Greeks, Italians and many Europeans are trying to do just that for their own children.
British historian Arnold Toynbee famously observed that civilisations die by suicide, not murder. Significant self-harm, if not cultural suicide, may be observed in the Anglo-American sphere with cancelling the Western canon and defunding the university departments and jobs that teach them.
Just make sure such wokeness doesn’t inflict the rest of the world. Otherwise, outsiders like us can observe, as Gray says, with “bemused indifference” rather than alarm.