If you believe that languages, ancient or modern, have no place in the national curriculum, you are either being lied to, or lying to yourself.

Labour’s decision to ditch the Latin Excellence Programme, affecting pupils in their current academic year, may have come as a shock to many. Yet, to anyone who has been looking at the gradual collapse of language learning in the British education system, this makes perfect sense. In order to chop down a tree, first, you cut the branches, then the trunk. And at last, you burn the stump. The withering of Modern Languages and the destruction of Classics partake in the same uprooting process, disconnecting Britain from its past and snapping off its ties with Europe.

I have some sympathy for English native speakers. Bilingualism is acknowledged as an incredible asset, not just in terms of professional opportunities, but because learning another language does wonders to the human brain. It increases cognitive functions such as memory, analogy, and capacity for communication. Yet the incentives to learn another language when one speaks English are much lower than for speakers of other languages. Whilst the European average of people speaking at least two languages is around 80 per cent, less than half the population in Britain falls under that category.

Deconstruction is now so dogmatic that Foucault and Derrida are probably turning in their graves

The study of Modern Languages is suffering from paradoxical, at times contradictory prejudice. It is too easy. It is too difficult. It is too broad. It is too specialised. It is elitist. It is useless. Whilst huge amounts of money are poured into getting girls interested in STEM, no one addresses the boys’ lack of interest in languages.

We are freshly out of another admissions round in Oxford. The last years have seen the arrival of the cohorts who did not have to take a foreign language for their GCSEs. The pupils who persevered and studied a foreign language up to A-Levels, then submitted their applications, really have some grit. Yet the numbers are dwindling.

One of the new arguments explaining the lack of interest in languages is the growth of artificial intelligence translation tools. I have tried these, and played with them a lot. They can be useful if you want to translate an instruction manual — at times with rather funny and impractical results — but will never render any form of more personal speech. Why? Because an individual’s use of language is an intricate weaving of conventional grammar, local idioms, and linguistic play on the distance between what is uttered and what is meant. If I make a joke based on putting a twist on an idiomatic phrase, an artificial intelligence software will not be able to translate it because no database contains it. We are humans, not data receptors. We know that there is a lot more to language than the mere transmutation of information. 

As Megan Bowler stated in the Higher Education Policy Institute report A Language crisis? (2020), there is nothing new about the idea of a language crisis in academia but we are witnessing something new: the institutional, unapologetic disregard for languages.

First, it started by focusing on the professional skills offered by languages. Now, in a post-Brexit world, whilst many are bemoaning the broken bonds with Europe, no one is willing to put in the money to foster young people’s interest in what is going on beyond the British isles.

No one is talking about the wreckage that the DEI elephant is causing in the Modern Languages teaching room — and I am afraid the same elephant has already confidently trampled through English and Classics. Remember the signs explaining why the plaster casts were “misleadingly white” in Cambridge? Instead of looking at the texts, pupils are taught to assess the level of racism, sexism, or heteronormativity of the author or of the characters. I have heard of a teenage boy who had to write an essay on “empathising with Miss Havisham”, as though there was nothing else to look at in Great Expectations, one of the best coming-of-age novels a boy could ever read. But we are told there is no such thing as the best anymore. Instead of being grateful for the scraps of the past we inherited, they are taught that the past is, at best, irrelevant, at worst, evil.

Of course it is not the pupils’ fault. The Humanities have become a laughing stock. The doctoral thesis Olfactory Ethics: the Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary prose gave the Internet an interesting peek at the Emperor’s bare buttocks, because Sokal’s hoax is now true. 

In the desperate struggle for relevance, Modern Languages has fully embraced the deconstructionist mindset. We have renounced the idea that some texts are more beautiful than others, and that there is something worth studying in the arrangements of sentences, words, sounds, and the images they create. Language and literature are, first and foremost, about the study of the beauty of words. But we have deconstructed, i.e. destroyed, any interest in beauty.

The institutions have thoroughly been marched through, now. If you want proof that radical left thinkers have total immunity, compare how easy it is for non-leftists to fall from the canon if a flaw is spotted in their writings or private life. Now look at Sartre and Beauvoir. Sartre defended every possible dictator in his lifetime. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, even Khomeyni, benefitted from his praise and support. Simone de Beauvoir supported the fall of the Iranian monarchy, in full knowledge of what the Iranian Revolution was to bring to women. But then again, what would you expect of an alleged women’s right defender who groomed her own students in order to throw them into Sartre’s bed?

The French intellectual Left, canonised by Californian universities, worships the power of destruction brought in by revolutions. On 26 November 1978, right before the Iranian revolution, Michel Foucault wrote in the Corriere della Sera: “This is the insurrection of bare-handed men who want to lift up the formidable burden weighing on all of us [ … ] it might be the first great insurrection against planetary systems, the most modern form of revolt, and the maddest.” I am not calling for their cancellation, but they are literally canonised — considered too holy and perfect to be criticised within academic walls. 

Symmetrically, everyone still gushes at Edward Said, whose Orientalism is blissfully oblivious of the work that the French and British empires did to preserve the linguistic and cultural heritage of North Africa and the Middle East.

And there is a deeper problem. There is an undeniable loss of knowledge from one generation to another. The most detrimental aspect of the Humanities’ quest for relevance can be seen at the Graduate and Postgraduate level. Most of the funding offers for graduate, doctoral, and post-doctoral research in Modern Languages and almost all the calls for papers for academic conferences in that field list the buzzwords: decolonial, gender, queer, race. In other words, at any academic level, if one wants to stay in the game, one has to toe the deconstruction line. And these young academics are the ones who go on into teaching. 

Deconstruction is now so dogmatic that Foucault and Derrida are probably turning in their graves, wishing the Anglosphere would stop turning their theories into a brave new system of mind control. We have decolonised the curriculum, deconstructed the canon, broken down every stone in the old house and are now left cold and barren. Pupils have been deprived of a heritage that they don’t even know they had. 

Because, ultimately, that is what it comes down to. Some elements of knowledge are now taboo, and uttering them can instantly turn you into the sacrificial ram that bears the sins of European empires. It is now simply wrong to say that the Greek and Roman civilisation shaped Europe, its languages, its literature, and its culture.

Here is the pitch for the Modern Languages Association’s Presidential Address, to be given this coming January: “In its effort to distinguish the humanities as an academic discipline from universal humanistic inquiry and concerns, the humanities rooted itself in a lament of the collapse of the cultural coherence of Greek and Roman civilisation. The implications of this misstep are still being felt today.”

This would be a typical example of rhetorical shrewdness. See how the assertions just flow from one another, alleging the Humanities’ raison d’être has been, firstly, to distinguish itself from “humanistic inquiry and concerns”. This simply means that before the Humanities were the place to bemoan systemic racism and sexual oppression, academics in the humanities were busy bemoaning the collapse of the Greek and Roman civilisation. Anyone who read academic works that predate the ethical turn of the 1980s knows how nonsensical this is. One may have different assessments of the empires, but the modern creed denying their influence is part of the newspeak that is gradually turning us into rootless, floating entities, with no connection to the past and no connection to one another.

Whether we want it or not, and I say that as an immigrant into the Western world, there is a Western civilisation. To deny it is to be a fish denying the existence of water. Discovering any European language shows that here is something in common between Spanish, Italian, German, and English culture that you will simply not find in other parts of the world. Had it not been for the Arab conquest, the North of Africa, too, would have been part of the European cultural sphere.

A system where the state stops offering exposure to classics and to languages only reinforces privilege

But learning a language, ancient or new, teaches more about the differences than about the common points between different cultures and countries. It allows us to see that people are rooted in space and time, and are not interchangeable. It shows the many ways in which mankind did great things and bad things; it fosters a critical mind about the other and about oneself.

Perhaps language acquisition is targeted because discovering a new civilisation puts a ticking bomb under the main Leftist delusion: that peoples, cultures, and civilisations can be both equal and different.

I know that because I am privileged, of course. My parents, who are Moroccan and never studied Classics in their life, were not affluent; but they invested in their children’s education. I was taught by teachers who fostered my interest in literature and languages. Knowledge was never put out of my reach by a greedy, wrongheaded government. I was never told that I should engage in “relatable” activities like graffiti rather than “visits to museums, theatres and art galleries” as this report suggests.

A system where the state stops offering exposure to classics and to languages only reinforces privilege. Some people will always know another language; some people will always learn Latin and Greek, maybe through their parents’ influence, or maybe thanks to a dedicated teacher; but for the sake of equal opportunity, we cannot afford to leave that to chance or to the accident of birth.

There is one shadow that ought to make everyone feel uncomfortable in policies that wish to deprive people of language. It implies that some people, because of their skin colour, their ethnic background, or their socio-economic circumstances, are simply not able to get it. Labour’s education policies come off as condescending, racist, and privileged.