Classics, Class and ‘Class. Civ.’ Qualifications in the 21st Century

 

On Thursday I was excited to deliver the inaugurating lecture of the new Leeds University Centre for Ancient World and Classical Reception Studies. The Director, Dr Bev Back, had asked me to report in the current relationship between Classics and socioeconomic class in the UK since the book I published, with Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland was published (Open Access) in 2020.

          An important development has been the establishment by a group of scholars, including Henry, of the Network for Working-Class Classicists, which earlier this year published their magnificent open-access report Classics in Class. This exposed the serious problems faced by socioeconomically deprived students and teachers of classical subjects and their institutional under-representation at all levels.  One of their recommendations is that access to classical subjects needs to be expanded, especially in regions where they are scarcely available. And at least on this issue there is some tentative good news.

          The project Advocating Classics Education that I’ve led since 2017 with Prof. Arlene-Holmes-Henderson seems to have made some impact, with numbers rising in enrolment for qualifications in both Classical Civilisation and Ancient History. 

Arlene and I have written a book which will be published next year by Liverpool University Press, Classical Civilisation and Ancient History in British Secondary Education, which covers not only the content and merits of these courses but their history. Our inspirational cover image was designed by Milo Palmer, then a year 8 student at Cranbrook School in Kent, after winning our nationwide competition.

          The origins of Classical Civilisation qualifications proved difficult to trace, but we unearthed an exciting story and identified an official birth date! The first ever examinations in Classical Civilisation at what was then called CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) were sat in May/June 1965! The 60th birthday party will coincide with the publication of our volume. Since  one of our longtime ACE campaigners, Dr Peter Swallow, was elected to parliament as Bracknell’s first ever Labour MP in July, we hope the celebrations may take on a nationwide dimension.

Classical Civilisation was very much a grass-roots endeavour, which began with committed teachers in the 1950s. They wanted pupils, often at Technical Colleges, who left school at 15, to benefit from some encounters with ancient Greece: see this inspiring, grainy photograph, all that remains of the performance of Aristophanes’ Peace by girls at Brierton Hill Technical High School for Girls, Hartlepool, in 1967. 

As soon as the school leaving age was raised to 16 and the CSE came into being, some progressive and far-sighted classicists led by the hero of the tale, John Sharwood Smith, got going on with designing CSE  courses in Classical Civilisation, and then, five years later, an A Level. 

John Sharwood Smith

They faced considerable opposition from old-fashioned school-teachers who wanted to stick to Latin language training despite fast-falling numbers when the requirement for O Level Latin was dropped for admission to Oxbridge. Sadly, far too many academic classicists sneered at Classical Civilisation for several decades after its inception, although few now do so today.

Leeds classicists have played an important role in the democratisation of Classics, both in the 1960s and 1970s and far earlier. I’m doing some research on W. Rhys Roberts, who was appointed Professor of Classics at Leeds University when it opened in 1904. 

He ran extra-mural courses for Leeds working people as well as being a great expert on ancient literary criticism and parallels between Welsh and Greek syntax. It was wonderful to share these heroes with a substantial number of Leeds undergraduates, who were not aware of the magnificence of their academic ancestors. More news soon, also on the extension of Classical Civilisation courses into UK prisons that I've recently initiated. I hope that the 60th anniversary and the book launch will help to keep this wonderful subject firmly on its course of expansion.