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If you learn Latin you’re pretty well ­limited to priests and monks for conversation. But the rewards are enormous. Latin is the code-breaking key for all the hard words in the English language. If you know 300 words of Latin and Greek you can answer about a ­quarter of quiz questions and work out what your doctor is doing to you.

I was reluctant to learn French in primary school and tried to bluff my way along for quite a while by just doing the accent and the shrugging. I got to grips with it only when I was fed vocabulary and grammar rules like a foie gras goose. It was hard work but efficient. To get the same basic proficiency by natural means you would have to spend three months in France making a fool of yourself and suffering the expert disdain of French ­people.

In their twisted world, facts learned by heart are the enemy of thought and creativity. They want children to learn through “active learning” which is fine when it just means a class debate but it has been known to involve mock trials, graffiti art and occasional puppet shows. I just hope today’s teachers never resign to become surgeons: “OK I’m in. Nurse, could you Google the pancreas for me?” The truth is that facts do furnish a mind like books furnish a room and I’m so glad I had a lot of them stuffed into me at school.

Never mind Sam, according to today’s educational establishment, not knowing anything would see you right for “cognitive development, critical understanding and creativity”. When Education Secretary Michael Gove launched his national curriculum recently 100 expert educationalists (oh blimey, here we go) denounced it as “endless lists of spelling, facts and rules” that would undermine pupils’ “ability to think”.

POETRY

The Gove plan is for schoolchildren to recite poetry by heart in the first two years and he says: “To know a poem by heart is to own a great work for ever.” Quite so. When you know poetry, verses sometimes come back to you in quiet moments, years apart, stitching together the chapters of your life. When I used to do debates on Radio 4 the sound engineers would ask me to say something for a microphone check. Instead of the usual “one-two, one-two” I would always give them a full Philip Larkin or a Siegfried Sassoon and they never once interrupted me. Such is the authority of spoken verse.

Naturally Gove has his critics. Poet Andrew Motion, famous for taking Lemsip to help bring on a “self-­pitying” mood of poetic melancholy, demands that pupils learn poetry “by heart, not by rote”. If he means that pupils should only memorise things that appeal to them from the start then I’m afraid that would exclude almost everything.

GRAMMAR and SPELLING

Teachers at a Bedfordshire secondary school were instructed last year not to correct more than three ­spelling errors at a time so as to ­bolster pupils’ self-esteem. That kind of ­educational nihilism has been going on for so long now that a semi-­literate generation of managers and civil servants has reached quite ­senior positions. I rarely get an ­official ­letter without mistakes.

Mr Gove wants pupils to master 200 ­complex spellings by the age of 11. We’ll see. Until very recently trainee teachers were expected to pass an English test the equivalent of GCSE grade C or D. In future it will be the equivalent of a B grade. Requiring teachers to be as good at English as most of their pupils is a start, I suppose. My plan is to give subsidised mobile phones to teen­agers that won’t send a text unless it’s spelled correctly and which give exclusive downloads if you know how to use an apostrophe.

1066 and all What?

Anti-Gove educationalists are ­furious that in the new curriculum pupils are to be taught a “sweeping chron­ology” of British history. Good. The present mission of school ­history is to instruct pupils in post-imperial guilt. Dissent is bitter. Historian Richard Evans decries Gove’s plan as “regression to the patriotic myths of the Edwardian era”. That’s unlikely to happen. Teachers of a progressive persuasion will still be free to push their own interpretations but at least teachers will at last have to teach things in the right order. Having a chronology gives pupils a fighting chance to form their own impression of what history means, while ­packaging it as “themes” does not.

RIGHT and WRONG

Schools for my generation didn’t exactly teach right and wrong, apart from the Ten Commandments and the school rule book issued on your first day was then ritually burnt in accordance with tradition. But my school and every other of the time had a sense of moral certainty. Even if there was no list of what was right and what was wrong you could easily find out by doing it and taking the consequences.

Compare that to the teacher overheard talking to her tiny pupils: “You’re going to respect me by being quiet while I’m talking and I’ll respect you by being quiet while you’re ­talking.” Education has to change. And that’s a fact.