The discussion of whether Latin should be in the curriculum, which extraordinarily upset some people on the left enough that they decided to whine to Bellagerens about it, reminded me of something I'd read about accountancy entrance exams from when the modern accountancy bodies we know and love today were fledgling organisations. But I couldn't remember the source. So I wrote to Malcolm Anderson, who was one of the authors of the fantastic book The Priesthood of Industry about the origins of the accounting profession, and he helpfully gave me some academic references to hunt through.

Eventually I found what I was looking for, in Francis W. Pixley's The profession of a chartered accountant and other lectures, delivered to the Institute of chartered accountants in England and Wales, the Institute of Secretaries, &c., &c (1897). A key strategy of the early forefathers of the profession was to make it as exclusive as possible. Accordingly, the ICAEW's founders made it a virtual requirement that all wannabe chartered accountants had a university degree. But they wanted to be fair to those that did not, so they permitted those seeking articled clerk positions an alternative. They could, instead, sit an academic exam with the following papers (Pixley, p.4):

(1) Writing from Dictation.
(2) Writing a short English Composition.
(3) Arithmetic.
(4) Algebra, to quadratic equations (inclusive).
(5) Euclid (the first four books).
(6) Geography.
(7) History of England.
(8) Latin (elementary).
(9) Any two of the following subjects, one of which, at least, must be a language, to be selected by the candidate:–
     (1) Latin; (2) Greek (ancient); (3) French; (4) German; (5) Italian; (6) Spanish; (7) Higher Mathematics; (8) Physics; (9) Chemistry; (10) Animal Physiology; (11) Zoology; (12) Botany; (13) Electricity, Magnetism, Light and Heat; (14) Geology; (15) Stenography.

In a brief article for Accountancy magazine in July 2007, Anderson notes that this test was designed specifically to keep the riff-raff out. But is it even conceivable that any 18 year old today could pass such a test?

Filed under: Academic research, Institutes with tags bellagerens, history, icaew, malcolm anderson
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Bellagerens is unhappy with Ed Balls. Balls has deemed that Latin is useless in schools. In response, the delightful Boris Johnson responded:

[T]here are times when a minister says something so maddening, so death-defyingly stupid, that I am glad not to be in the same room in case I should reach out, grab his tie, and end what is left of my political career with one almighty head-butt.

Something I think we'd all pay good money to see. But Balls's comments are deeply ignorant. Not so long ago, before universities had developed fully-fledged undergraduate computer science courses, classics was the preferred subject for computer software companies when selecting graduates. They found that classics graduates were better than graduates of other disciplines at thinking clearly through a problem. Must have been all those Latin sentences, I guess.

The same skills are valuable in accountancy too. Accountancy also requires precision of thought. Unpicking the debits and credits (lest we forget, words both derived from Latin) that are needed to account for a particular transaction use many of the same sorts of skills that you would use in deconstructing a Latin sentence. And just like UK accountancy’s concept of ‘true and fair’, you might be able to find several answers in Latin translation, but some of them may be better than others. Elegance has a part to play in both disciplines.

Besides, Latin is a brilliant sourcebook for determining how English grammar works and for remembering how to spell fiddly English words. It’s much more difficult for someone who has studied Latin to misspell, say, “independent”, because the Latin pendere screams out at them. Subjunctives in English? Not a problem, you probably learnt them in Latin. Nobody ever taught me them in English. They didn’t need to.

Even for a quiet, reserved boy like me, Latin’s educational payload was irresistible. By translating these texts into English, you revealed mighty battles, terrible monsters such as Scylla and Charybdis (go on then, which would you choose?) and the deception of the Trojan horse. We learned about monumentally sensible Roman ideas, such as building roads in a straight line or building heating under the floor, and some ghoulish practices such as the punishment of decimation for cowardly soldiers. Take away the Latin and the rationale for teaching these to children goes away. Why teach children rancid subjects like citizenship when you can teach them about how the Roman Senate worked? Or about what democracy meant in Roman times?

has a bee in his bonnet over the issue. Even now, it would appear that those who studied Oxford’s terrifying four-year Literae Humaniores, known affectionately as Greats, look down snippily on the lesser mortals who could only manage PPE. In the lesser camp is Balls, who one might imagine was heavy on the politics and economics and light on the philosophy, wouldn’t even have studied the most valuable element of the course.

Filed under: Other blogs with tags bellagerens, boris johnson, ed balls, latin, literae humaniores, mythology, oxford university, ppe
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