I’ve been following the ‘Balls vs. Johnson’ Latin debate avidly over the last few weeks. Being a bit of a linguist myself, I find the debate about whether the fact that Latin is not a living language can be compensated for by how useful it is in academia or its propaedeutic values when learning other languages later on.

While I was doing some background reading on Balls and Johnson, I was a little surprised (and disturbed) to find out that the ‘Balls Johnson’ dance is a kind of male genital gymnastics.

The thing I was most surprised about, though, was that the comments on all the blogs I’ve read about this debate seem to centre on who would win a fight between Ed and Boris rather than whether or not Latin is actually useful to learn at school.

The Guardian’s article, as well as the customary mention of Boris’ £250,000 salary for his column in the Telegraph, offered such gems as “Is he going to butt him in the Ed or the Balls?” from commenter ‘Spoonface’.

The fightin’ talk in the comments beneath the original article on the Telegraph’s website was a little more surreal with one commenter calling for “40 lashes with a wet noodle!”.

The best ‘Balls vs. Johnson’ article I’ve seen so far is over at adamsmith.org. It has a great picture of Ed Balls rocking out and looking a little like David Brent. It’s also well-balanced and contains a lot of common sense. The main reason I like it, though, is because mentions that Balls thinks Latin is ‘harmful’.

I can think of a lot of negative adjectives people use to describe Latin. ‘Boring’ or ‘irrelevant’ are the first two that spring to mind, but I don’t see how learning any language could be ‘harmful’.

Teenagers like ‘harmful’ things, though. ‘Harmful’ things are ‘cool’. Warnings on cigarette packs don’t put kids off smoking, they just make it more intriguing to them. Maybe language teachers could harness this reverse-psychology make language-learning ‘cool’. Are modern foreign languages as ‘harmful’ as Latin? I’m not sure, but if I can make them seem ‘harmful’ enough, maybe my students will concentrate as hard in class as they do on avoiding getting caught smoking.

Right, I’m off to stick “Warning! Language-learning is harmful and my cause cleverness” labels on all my textbooks.

Original photo by Jenny Rollo, edited by SimonSays.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 9:35 am and is filed under Government, Health and Safety, Newspapers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.