Jemima Lewis: You can't beat a traditional liberal education

If you understand physics, you can (and will) wire up a digital home entertainment system

Published: 14 July 2007

Nothing gets my reactionary instincts twitching quite like The Learning Curve, Radio 4's weekly programme on education. Lying in bed a couple of Sundays ago, for instance, I found myself suddenly writhing with irritation at a feature on music teaching, in which five talented "youngsters" won a competition to write a protest song and perform it at Glastonbury.

The teenagers concerned sounded just the sort you would be delighted to meet down a dark alley: polite, well-spoken and ideologically docile. Having been instructed to protest, they duly thrashed out a banal piece of angst about - surprise! - the Iraq war. "It's pretty much, er, almost a story, almost a narrative of watching a war and it kind of just hits home how futile the concept of war is," explained one of these nice young rebels.

There was a time, so long ago that it has almost calcified into fable, when teenagers were capable of genuine thought. Milton was writing psalms at 15; John Stuart Mill, having ticked off ancient Greek by the age of three, was pondering the nature of scholastic logic by 12. Between the ages of 14 and 16, Mozart was commissioned to write three operas based on classical myth and history, all of which were performed to acclaim in Milan. Blaise Pascal, meanwhile, was only 12 when he scribbled down the now-familiar proof that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right-angles.

Not everyone can be a nascent genius, of course: but with a decent liberal education, you didn't have to be. The most plodding of brains could leave school stuffed with enough Latin, Greek, history and mathematics to shame his modern counterpart. Even upper-class women, who were deliberately kept in a state of ignorance, could usually write, paint, play the piano and converse in French better than you or me.

Times have changed, we comfort ourselves: the sum of human knowledge has expanded hugely, and education has had to adapt. Instead of learning a few rarified subjects in depth, we must cultivate a broad range of relevant "skills". That is certainly the thrust behind the Government's new school curriculum, which aims to give teachers more freedom to choose up-to-date topics, helping children to cope with "the needs of the time".

Thus, pupils may get lessons in global warming, cookery or personal finance. It's all about flexibility and choice, explained Ken Boston, head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. "Instead of teaching them the battle of Malplaquet, you teach them how to cook food. Are we going to teach the battle of Nile, or are we going to teach about how to take out a mortage?"

There are two implausible notions here: first, the idea that modern schoolchildren are routinely taught the battle of Malplaquet; and second, that learning about mortgages might be a useful substitute for any academic discipline. What teenager - short-termist and easily bored at the best of times - could sit through a lesson on tiered interest rates and capital-protected ISAs? These things are painful enough for adults, and we at least know that our lives, or at least our life savings, depend on it.

I was unlucky enough to attend two schools where "life skills" were considered just the thing: one a trendy comprehensive, the other a convent run by well-meaning but unacademic nuns. At the comprehensive we sang Pink Floyd songs during morning assembly, and history and geography were banished in favour of "environmental studies", which required us to write empathetic essays about the daily lives of the Inuit. At the convent we studied the "home economics" of making dried-up vegetable lasagne, while in real economics we learnt nothing of Adam Smith or Karl Marx: instead, we were sent on to the streets of Twickenham to poll passers-by on where they had bought their shoes.

The result of this relevant and practical schooling is a life-long frustration at the gaps - no, chasms - in my knowledge. I am seized with jealousy of my husband, who had the closest thing to an old- fashioned liberal education that money can buy. He learnt Latin and Greek at eight, speaks fluent French, knows the Old Testament backwards and can still recite the Periodic Table. Life skills come easily to him because the basics are already there: if you can do Latin grammar, you can learn new languages in a jiffy; if you understand physics, you can (and will) wire up a digital surround-sound home entertainment system.

Ken Boston says that change is necessary because the current national curriculum "has delivered all it can: it will work no more". It is the right diagnosis, but the wrong cure. Instead of broadening the range of subjects, we should be narrowing it down to those that cannot easily be picked up outside the classroom. The modern child needs no lessons in IT and has done nothing to deserve lessons in pension provision. Teach him instead about Nelson and Newton, dangling participles and double helixes, and you will give him the key to a lifetime of learning.

jemima.lewis@ virgin.net

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