Woke censorship of UK Latin teaching
Posted by admin978 on April 9, 2022 · Leave a Comment
The tide of ‘woke’ political correctness has finally reached one of the final bastions of traditional British education – the small number of schools that still teach Latin.
Classical education was fundamental to many generations of Britons, including those who built and ruled the British Empire (often in conscious emulation of the Romans). Now that traditional education is deemed to have transgressed against the holy commandments of ‘woke’.
At the centre of the row is the Cambridge Latin Course, a series of books first introduced in 1970 and now used in the vast majority of those British schools that still teach Latin. (Although when I was taught Latin from 1978-1984, we used much older textbooks, and until this row developed I knew nothing of these Cambridge books.)
The books teach children their first simple Latin phrases by introducing the household of a Roman called Lucius Caecilius – a real man who lived in Pompeii, the city largely destroyed by volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Caecilius himself had probably died seventeen years before this eruption, but his home can still be seen in the ruins of Pompeii and some of its contents are in the Naples archaeological museum.
The problem for modern politically correct censors is that Caecilius – like all wealthy Romans of his era – owned slaves. These slaves were probably White, but the racial politics of our own era means that any mention of slavery requires all White people to grovel in apology, however absurd, ahistorical or otherwise meaningless such apologies are.
The teaching of history is no longer an end in itself – still less is it allowed for Europeans to have any pride in their classical ancestry. Rather, it is compulsory to search for aspects of the past that lead to denigration of our own civilisations.
In addition, the school and university curriculum must be purged of anything that might cause offence to any protected group. The league table of protected groups is headed by Jews, then extends via ethnic minorities, the infinitely expanding variety of sexual minorities, and eventually to women in general. The only group without a victim card to play in this game are White men.
And the problem with the Cambridge Latin Course is that the slaves in Caecilius’ household are portrayed as going about their daily tasks in a normal and even happy environment.
A nuanced approach to teaching Latin (and Ancient History) would have to accept that there were many brutal realities, or just very strange aspects of life in the ancient world that are not suitable for young children, so inevitably when they are introduced to this world it will be in a sanitised and incomplete form.
But for the woke generation of teachers, the whole point of teaching any subject is to instil wokeness. So the Cambridge Latin Course seems likely to be scrapped, and replaced by something that better suits the brainwashing agenda of the 2020s.
Perhaps one of Roman history’s traditional villains will be reinvented as a hero for the 2020s?
Publius Clodius was a vicious gangster and pervert whose murder by a rival gangster in 52 BC led to one of the great speeches by Cicero, the most famous legal orator in history, who successfully defended Clodius’ murderer Titus Annius Milo.
In this speech (Pro Milone) Cicero refers to Clodius’ part in one of the greatest scandals of Ancient Rome some ten years earlier, when Clodius disguised himself as a woman in order to infiltrate the traditional women-only religious rite of the Bona Dea.
This was an all-night festival conducted at the home of Rome’s ceremonial chief priest (on this occasion Julius Caesar), but in an environment that was not only all-female but which had to be ritually cleansed of all male associations before the ceremony (even of male animals or works of art portraying men).
So when Clodius dressed as a woman and attended the event, it was a major scandal, inevitably involving rumours of sexual perversion involving Caesar’s then wife and even Clodius’ own sister. Modern readers are perhaps most familiar with the case because of the phrase Caesar used when divorcing his wife: although there was no proof that she had connived with Clodius, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion”.
Clodius was prosecuted for incestum (which in Roman law meant ‘sacrilege’ rather than what we would now call ‘incest’, though one of the allegations was that he had indeed committed incest with his sister).
He was eventually acquitted because a powerful political ally bribed the jury. In 2022 the verdict of woke historians does not need to be bought. After all in our world, we are no longer permitted to recognise biological differences between men and women, so the Bona Dea ceremony itself would be unacceptable and Clodius would be judged a pioneering transsexual hero!
Perhaps the cross-dressing adventures of Clodius will replace the now-unacceptable Cambridge Latin Course as a means of introducing children to the classical world?
Or more likely the entire history of that world will be scrapped, and replaced by something more suitable for teaching European children that they must bow down before Africans.
