Which Languages to Teach:
The Classical-Modern Debate andthe Future of English Education
Tom GALLY

A major shift seems to be occurring in the teaching of English
as a second language. This shift is away from teaching English
as it is used by native speakers in Britain or the United States
and toward instruction in varieties of English spoken on a moreglobal scale, both within countries such as India, Nigeria, or Singapore and in international interactions among people for whom
English is a common language. Because this shift affects the very
core of what is taught in the ESL classroom—that is, the formsof the English language itself and the cultural knowledge andpragmatic skills associated with the language—it has the potential to transform profoundly nearly every aspect of English education, from the content of textbooks and the assessment of students to the hiring of teachers.
One factor driving this shift, of course, is the growing roleof English worldwide. English is increasingly a lingua franca forbusiness, government, cultural, and personal communication
both inside many countries and internationally. In fact, a young
person now studying English in a country such as Japan or
Brazil is likely, when older, to communicate in English less withnative British or American speakers than with people from, say,
Korea or Peru. As English thus becomes more widely used on adaily basis among people for whom it is a second language, it isnaturally also becoming more varied in its pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatics. Many educators therefore feelthat their students need to understand, and be understood in,varieties of English other than standard British or American, andsome are beginning to adapt their curricula accordingly.
But another factor is also driving the move toward a greater
diversity of linguistic models in English education: political and37

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ideological attitudes. For some scholars in the fields of World
Englishes and critical applied linguistics, the history of Britishcolonialism and of American military, economic, and cultural
expansionism has associated traditional English teaching witha neoimperialistic agenda. These scholars often frame theirresearch and educational proposals in the contexts of power relations, national and personal identity, and postcolonialism, andthey promote the use of ESL curricula that not only teach thecomprehension and use of other varieties of English but also
encourage students’ engagement with the political and culturalissues associated with the dominance of English worldwide.1
Although some progress has been made in both theoreticaland practical approaches to teaching nontraditional versions ofEnglish,2 it is difficult now to predict how widely those
approaches will actually be adopted. One reason is the practicaldifficulty of implementing polymodels—that is, the exposure of
students to multiple varieties of English—in the classroom. For
beginning and intermediate learners struggling with the alwaysdifficult task of learning a foreign language, being confronted
with several pronunciations of the same word or different words
for a single concept seems likely to make the burden only
heavier. For teachers as well, it can be very challenging to teachmultiple versions of a language, especially if one has had little
first-hand contact with some of those dialects. Another potential
hindrance to the success of the World Englishes approach in ESL
teaching is that the political assumptions behind much current
discourse in the field are likely to be shared by only some students, teachers, and administrators. Arguments about learners’“ownership” of English (Seidlhofer, 2009), the need for “decolonization” of English-language teaching (Kumaravadivelu, 2003),
or the importance of “awareness of the politics of English,
including such issues as language and power” (Matsuda andFriedrich, 2011, p. 341) are unlikely to be persuasive to students,
teachers, and administrators focused on test scores, university
admissions, and the job market, and they might be actively
opposed by people who have different political attitudes. Thus,
while the traditional model of teaching only standard British or
American English to, for example, Japanese children may indeed
be inadequate in today’s world, it is not clear that approaches
that embrace diverse, pluralistic views of the language can over38

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come the practical barriers, bureaucratic inertia, and ideologicalresistance they are bound to face.
To gain some insight into what version or versions of English might come to dominate ESL teaching in future decades, thispaper examines a similar controversy from the past about which
languages should be taught in schools. Throughout much of the
19th century and into the 20th, there was a vigorous debate in
Britain and elsewhere about whether schools and universities
should continue to teach primarily the classical languages of
Latin and Greek or should put more emphasis on modern languages such as French and German. Although some aspects ofthat dispute seem far removed from the present day—particularly the debate’s almost exclusive focus on the elite education ofboys—the arguments made on both sides cast a revealing lighton the current controversies over what types of English should
be taught in the classroom.

The Classical Tradition
A book edited by the British theologian and educator Frederic
William Farrar and published in London in 1867 under the title
Essays on a Liberal Education begins with an essay by Charles
Stuart Parker, then a fellow of University College, Oxford, on thehistory of classical education in Western Europe. According toParker,[H]istory can give but one account of [classical education’s]
origin. It arose from the relations in which the Greek and
Latin languages have stood, in the past, to the whole higher
life, intellectual and moral, literary and scientific, civil andreligious, of Western Europe. Greeks and Romans, as well
as Jews, are our spiritual ancestors. They left treasures ofrecorded thought, word, and deed, by the timely and judicious use of which their heirs have become the leaders ofmankind. But they left them in the custody of their native
tongues. (pp. 1–2)
As Latin was the tongue of the Church of Rome, it was especially
important for religious reasons. As Parker notes:
39

KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION[I]n the Middle Ages Latin was made the groundwork ofeducation; not for the beauty of its classical literature, nor
because the study of a dead language was the best mental
gymnastic, or the only means of acquiring a masterly freedom in the use of living tongues, but because it was thelanguage of educated men throughout Western Europe,
employed for public business, literature, philosophy, andscience, above all, in God’s providence, essential to theunity, and therefore enforced by the authority, of the Western Church. (pp. 7–8)
In the 14th century, when the study of classical Greek was
revived in Italy, providing access to “the general literature andphilosophy of the Greeks [and] their natural history, physics,
mathematics, medicine, and other sciences” (p. 14), facility inboth classical languages became the key to learning and the professions, not only in Italy but also, later, in Germany, France, andBritain. The Reformation, with Martin Luther’s call for direct
knowledge and understanding of the Bible, brought even stronger emphasis on the study of Greek (as well as Hebrew) in
Northern Europe.
By the 16th century, a large school in Strasburg run by
Johannes Sturm was conducting its education entirely in theclassical languages:
To gain colloquial readiness, all the boys speak Latin . . . .
The masters are forbidden to address them in German. The
boys are severely chastised if they use their mother tongue.
On the way to and from school, and in games, they are to
speak only Latin, or Greek. (p. 37)
This school, which taught the children of both the rich and poor,
attracted students from throughout Europe and was the model
for many similar schools. While education that ignores the students’ mother tongue might seem extreme, Latin was “the common language of educated Europe” (p. 41), and thus proficiency
in that language would be a valuable practical skill for studentsof that school.3 A similar trend also occurred in England in the
16th century, when “Grammar and the Classics were established,
and for three centuries [ever since] have been accepted in prac40

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tice as constituting, with religion, the whole course of liberalschool education” (p. 54). Despite the recognition later that
instruction in English and other modern languages, as well as in
the natural sciences, would be of more practical use, knowledgeof the classical languages and literatures continued to be thechief prerequisite for admission to the leading British universities and thus remained the focus of school education as well.

The Modern Uprising
But for nearly as long as the classical languages were the centerpiece of school education in Britain the exclusive focus on them
was attacked. In 1693, John Locke wrote in Some Thoughts Concerning Education:. . . Can there be any thing more ridiculous, than that a
Father should waste his own Money, and his Son’s time, insetting him to learn the Roman Language, when at the sametime he designs him for a Trade, wherein he having no Useof Latin, fails not to forget that little which he brought from
School, and which ’tis Ten to One he abhors for the ill Usage
it procur’d him? Could it be believ’d, unless we had everywhere amongst us Examples of it, that a Child should beforced to learn the Rudiments of a Language which he isnever to use in the Course of Life that he is designed to, andneglect all the while the writing a good Hand, and casting
Account, which are of great Advantage in all Conditions ofLife, and to most Trades indispensibly necessary? (p. 242;
italics in original here and below)
Although Locke did not object to the teaching of Latin itself but
rather to how it was taught—he was an advocate of what might
now be called a natural, direct, oral, or immersion method of
language instruction (“To trouble the Child with no Grammar atall, but to have Latin, as English has been, without the Perplexityof rules, talked into him,” p. 243)—his mention of the lack ofpractical applications for Latin in business anticipates later arguments in favor of the teaching of modern languages. For example, in a book published in New York in 1856 titled The Relative
Importance of Ancient and Modern Languages Considered as Branches
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of General Education, the unidentified author writes:
Living languages are indispensable to travellers, merchants,
and statesmen, to diplomatic and consular agents, to naval
and military men, to the man of fashion, as to the man ofscience; whereas the usefulness of the ancient languages,
viewed either as stores of knowledge, or as means of communication, is at the present day very limited. (p. 57)
In 1887, in a lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge, Charles Colbeck, an assistant master in the Harrow
School, made the same point even more succinctly:
Why then do we teach Modern Languages?
Essentially because they are so supremely useful. Let us
not be ashamed to say this. The advance in the teaching ofthem has kept pace and will continue to keep pace with theadvance of utilitarianism in education . . . . (p. 2).
He went on to enumerate the ways in which those languages
had become useful in Britain over the course of the 19th century:
Commerce and industry, travel and geography, the inclusionin the public school system of the middle classes, theincrease of population, the reform of the public services,competitive examinations, the Napoleonic wars, the writings of Goethe and Schiller, a German Prince Consort, international exhibitions, international trade, the struggle forexistence and survival of the fittest, these and all that they
implied combined to raise the study of modern languages
from the status of an accomplishment, or a commercial art,
on a level let us say with book-keeping, to rank as an integral portion of a liberal education. (p. 3)
These sentiments were widely shared, as documented
extensively in an acerbic book, published in 1891, by A. F. Chamberlain of Clark University in Massachusetts. Titled Modern
Languages and Classics in America and Europe Since 1880: Ten Years’
Progress of the New Learning, the book records, largely throughquotations, the arguments against classical education and in
42

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favor of the teaching of modern languages not only in Britain
and the United States but also in France, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Norway, and Sweden. The emotions evoked by the debate
are clear from Chamberlain’s choice of quotations, which are fullof phrases like “the safe and elegant imbecilities of classical culture” and “the shortcomings and failings of Latin literature when
considered esthetically” (p. 15), and from his own remarks, suchas his comment about the “nonsense and rhetorical braggadocio. . . uttered by the ultra-classicists” (p. 12) and his derision of
Greek as “a collection of philosophic quibbles and dead etymologies” (pp. 24–25).4
Despite the general shift toward the teaching of modern
languages, defenders of the classical tradition did not give up. In
1916, an elegantly written and well argued book was publishedin London under the title A Defence of Classical Education. The
author, Richard Winn Livingstone, was a fellow and assistanttutor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a prolific writer onclassical topics. Though defending the study of the ancients, heframed his argument in the urgency of the moment: Britain’s
perilous situation that year in its war with Germany. The present
danger, he suggested, was the result of deficiencies in Britain’s
scientific prowess and of the superiority of Germany’s. While
this emphasis on science might seem to counter his argument infavor of the classics, he confronted this objection head-on:. . . it is implied that [the Germans] have become ‘scientific’by giving physical science a predominant place in theirhigher education. Nothing could be further from the truth.
On the contrary their secondary education is far more classical than ours, and they have far more compulsory Greek
and Latin. (pp. 2–3)
Livingstone did not go so far as to assert that classical education
was necessary for a nation to become strong in the modern
world, but he did claim that the German case proved that “anation can be ‘scientific,’ though compulsory classics are the staple of its secondary education, and though the majority of its
youth is trained in classical schools” (p. 5).
Having dispensed with the most timely objection to classicaleducation, Livingstone moved on to more general arguments in
43

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its favor. His first concerned the value of the study of literature,
history, and philosophy for building a broad perspective, criticalthinking skills, artistic sensibility, and personal character—andthe political discernment that such qualities provide. The lack ofsuch qualities in the British people, he suggested, was one reason for his country’s difficult situation at the time:
The attitude of some sections of our population at the beginning of this war should have convinced the most scepticalthat the ignorance of a democracy is a real danger. Now thisknowledge [of political and moral problems] cannot be
acquired merely by living in the world. It is in books. Physical science cannot give it; for it is the knowledge of man
recorded in history, and, more vaguely, in literature. (p. 33)
Having made his argument in favor of an education
grounded in the humanities, Livingstone then moved on to arguments for the study of Greek and Latin. His claims had several
thrusts: the role of Greece and Rome as the basis for modern
European languages, literatures, and civilization; the value of theideas contained in Greek and Latin literature, both in themselves
and as guides for the modern world; the difficulty of grasping
the aesthetic and intellectual virtues of the Greek and Latin
classics through translations into English; and the benefits to theyoung mind of learning Greek and, especially, Latin grammar
and of translating into and out of those languages. He summed
up his arguments as follows:
The case for the classics is cumulative; no single item
may turn the scale, and yet all together they may do so.
Review the arguments in turn. Against the difficulty oflearning Greek and Latin set the fact that without them wecannot have a scientific knowledge of much in our own andother modern tongues, and that Latin is a real help in thelearning of these; that Latin and Greek are admirable schoolmasters in the study of human thought as expressed in language, and that they give a mental discipline and gymnasticof thought, absolutely necessary in education, and not to be
got so completely and satisfactorily in any other way. Addthat if we know nothing of Greece and Rome we are igno44

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rant of our origins, and lose the key to much in our own literature and much in the modern world; that we are cutting
ourselves off from the two greatest and most influential
civilisations on which Europe is built up, and from two literatures, of which one, in completeness and excellence, has
never been surpassed; that we are declining intimacy with
poets and pioneers of thought, among them some of thegreatest masters of the human mind; that we are refusing
the educational advantages which come from the simplicity
and completeness of Greek history and literature; and that
we are neglecting to provide ourselves with the only independent standards there are, with which to compare andtest our own ideals and civilisations. These advantages have
kept the classics in our higher education, and we must consider very seriously whether we shall become a better ormore efficient nation by sacrificing them. (pp. 235–237)
These are powerful arguments. Although rejected by some—H. G. Wells, for one, attacked Livingstone’s arguments fiercely
in a 1917 essay titled “The Case against the Classical Languages,”
primarily on the grounds that studying the classics was tootime-consuming and that the learning they provided was more
readily accessible in English—they no doubt were compelling tomany others at the time. What Livingstone’s arguments failed todo, however, was to halt the shift of school and university language education away from the classical languages. While Greek
and Latin are, of course, still studied by some in Britain and elsewhere, the languages most often taught in schools and colleges
there and in most other countries today are modern ones.

The Arguments Then and Now
The debate over the teaching of classical or modern languages in
the 19th and early 20th centuries and the current movement toincorporate multiple, global versions of English into the secondlanguage classroom differ in several important aspects. The classical-modern debate was waged most fiercely in countries where
secondary education was far from universal and higher education was limited to a privileged few; in contrast, the World Englishes movement exists in an era when school education is com45

KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

pulsory in many countries where English is a second or foreign
language and where a high percentage of secondary school
graduates go on to higher education. Another difference is that
Latin and Greek were—as anticlassicists liked to deride them—dead languages, with practically no fluent speakers, native orotherwise, while English is robustly alive today. A third difference is that the classical-modern debate was over which distinct
languages to teach, while the World Englishes movement
focuses on variations of a single language; becoming skilled atboth Latin and Greek, two very different languages, is presumably more difficult than attaining proficiency in, for example,
both British and Singaporean English.
But there are important similarities as well. One is the universality of education in the languages for those who do attend
school. For centuries, a boy educated in Britain beyond the elementary level was required to study Latin and Greek; today,
schoolchildren in many countries must study English. In bothcases, the languages, like all second languages, are difficult toteach and learn effectively, and they are made more so by thevery fact that their study is required, thus decreasing student
motivation. As a consequence, many, even most students,
despite years of effort, ultimately fail to learn them well. Anothersimilarity is that language teaching in both contexts is surrounded by a vast academic and commercial apparatus. “Thevested interests of classical study,” the American classicist Basil
Lanneau Gildersleeve wrote, “are even from a mercantile pointof view enormous. Not only the teachers but book-makers havea heavy stake in the fortunes of the classics” (quoted by Chamberlain, 1891, pp. 14–15). The vested interests, both academic and“mercantile,” of traditional English education today are probably even more enormous.
Perhaps the most interesting similarity, for the purposes ofthis study, between the classical-modern debate and the proposals to teach global English is the manner in which the argumentsin each case divide into practical and idealistic sides. For theclassicists, the balance between the two sides shifted over time.
For several centuries after the establishment of classical education in Europe, in fact, the practical necessity for knowledge ofclassical languages, especially Latin, was so obvious that few
educators needed to raise those arguments explicitly. It was only
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in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the need for an abilityin Latin and Greek to acquire useful knowledge or to communicate with others had waned, that the less utilitarian, more idealistic arguments came to the fore. Livingstone and others argued
forcefully that learning the classical languages and literatures
made students more logical in their thinking, better able tounderstand and express abstract ideas, more appreciative of thebeauties of language and literature, more knowledgeable about
the foundations of Western civilization, and, in the end, better
people and better citizens. The practical roles of Latin and Greek
had nearly disappeared, so their advocates thus found other reasons to justify their continued study. The utilitarian argumentsthat the classicists did make—that experience translating from
Latin and Greek made students better writers of English, or thatknowledge of Latin and Greek roots improved students’ English
vocabulary—were forced and unconvincing, and they were easily demolished by the modernists.
In the case of World Englishes, the practical and idealistic
arguments exist contemporaneously. When Aya Matsuda andPatricia Friedrich, for example, write that “traditional approaches
in ELT [English-language teaching], which privilege the US and
UK in terms of both linguistic and cultural representations, may
not adequately prepare EIL [English as an international language] users for their future interlocutors from other Englishspeaking contexts” (2011, p. 332), they are making both a practical argument (about preparing students for real-life situations)and an idealistic argument (against granting undue advantages
to powerful countries). When B. Kumaravadivelu writes, in thefirst paragraph of a paper titled “A Postmethod Perspective on
English Language Teaching,” that “the English language, in its
long march to its current global status, was aided and abetted bycolonialist and imperialist projects that trampled upon the political, cultural and linguistic heritage of millions of people acrossthe globe” (2003, p. 539), the idealistic framework is dominant.
The idealistic arguments of Matsuda, Friedrich, Kumaravadivelu, and others when advocating greater recognition for othertypes of English in education are powerful in the same way that
Livingstone’s idealistic arguments for classical education werepowerful. In both cases, the scholars look beyond the narrow,short-term goals of much classroom education—testing, grades,
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certifications, etc.—and consider the effect of their educational
program on their students’ future lives and on society as awhole. The fact that Livingstone was, in his time, conservative
and that the advocates of the World Englishes perspective often
use the language of progressive or radical politics is irrelevant
for this comparison. What matters is that classical-language
education eventually died out and modern languages prevailed.
Despite their cramped focus, the arguments for the everyday,
utilitarian, commercial advantages of French and German outweighed the arguments for the character- and nation-building
advantages of Latin and Greek.

The Future of English Education
It is in light of this victory—for narrow-minded utility overvisionary ideals—that the potential fate of World Englishes insecond-language education needs to be considered. It is true thatmany young students learning English as a second language
today will need to interact with people who use a variety of Englishes. Education focused solely on British or American English
is indeed inadequate for that purpose, and if polymodel pedagogy is possible in practice then it might very well become themainstream methodology for ESL. But given the difficulty ofteaching and learning even one version of a language, it isunclear whether most students can be made reasonably competent in more than one variety. Mere exposure to multiple varieties or to knowledge about the diverse roles of English in theworld today might not yield the practical outcomes that, in theclassical-modern debate, were decisive in determining which
languages would eventually be taught.
In this regard, the attitudes of people who, when younger,
learned English through World Englishes pedagogies will bear
great weight. Running throughout the 19th-century and early
20th-century attacks on classical education is a distinct sense of
resentment toward the classical education that the attackers
themselves had been forced to endure as children. Part of that
resentment was directed merely against the way in which thelanguages were taught, including the heavy emphasis on grammar from the early stages of learning and the corporal punishment that sometimes accompanied those lessons. But most of the48

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resentment seems to have been prompted by the writers’ realization that, as adults, they were not enjoying enough practicalbenefits from their past study of Latin and Greek to justify the
many hours they had devoted to the languages in their youth. If,
twenty or thirty years from now, people who, when young, were
exposed to or were taught global Englishes have risen to positions of influence in education, business, culture, and government believe that they themselves have benefited from thatapproach, then the current focus on British and American linguistic models will no doubt fade away. If, on the other hand, thedominant perception of those future leaders is that the time they
had devoted to learning, and learning about, multiple versionsof English had been wasted—perhaps because they never, in theend, had much need to use those alternative versions of English,
or because they would prefer to be more fluent in a dialect still
perceived by some as more prestigious—then the polymodel
approach will be the one that fades away.
Another potential barrier to the success of the World Englishes perspective to second-language education is indifferenceor opposition to some of the fundamental ideas supporting thatparadigm. One of those ideas is an emphasis on descriptive, as
opposed to prescriptive, approaches to language study—that is,considering languages in view of how they are actually usedby all of their speakers and writers, rather than how people inpositions of power or influence assert they should be used. The
descriptive approach is fundamental both to the modern scienceof linguistics and to the World Englishes paradigm. However, asI have noted elsewhere (Gally, 2009), most nonlinguists, regardless of their level of education, seem to view language primarilyprescriptively, that is, to believe that there are correct and incorrect forms of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary and thatchildren should be taught only the correct forms. While theiremphasis on nonjudgmental linguistic diversity is admirable,
World Englishes advocates will have to overcome the prejudicesin favor of British and American English held by people worldwide, including, significantly, many language educators.
Another challenge for World Englishes advocates is theheavily politicized vocabulary and reasoning that they use tosupport their ideas. While many people throughout the world
are opposed to the political, economic, and cultural domination
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that are said to underlie the spread of English worldwide, others,
including many in influential positions in business and government, are more willing to accommodate themselves to that domination. For such powerful people in particular, the World Englishes focus on the empowerment of students and on opposition
to the privileging of British and American English may seem tobe a threat to their own power and privileges, thus leading toactive opposition by educational administrators and government
officials to the adoption of global Englishes in the classroom.
Even more important than active opposition to the politicalmotives of many World Englishes advocates could be mere political indifference among English learners. The degree of politicalengagement by young people varies considerably from country
to country and from generation to generation, and politically justified World Englishes pedagogies might indeed succeed if they
happen to come to the fore at places and times when students
are actively concerned about the relationship of their classroom
education to larger political and social issues. During periods ofpolitical apathy among young people, however, emphasizing
such issues in the language classroom might only serve to demotivate students even further.
Finally, as in the 19th century, commerce also plays a key
role. While the majority of ESL teaching worldwide probably
takes place in regular schools and universities, the commercial
sector of language institutes, conversation schools, test-preparation courses, online instruction, and self-study materials is alsohuge. What distinguishes such “mercantile” education fromconventional classroom teaching, especially in state-sponsoredschools, is its keen sensitivity to customer demand. If people
paying directly out of their own (or their parents’) pockets tolearn English want to study global Englishes, the market willquickly adapt to meet those needs. If the customers instead prefer to learn English as it is spoken and written by native speakers
in Britain or the United States, no arguments in favor of global
Englishes—whether political or practical—will have mucheffect.
The classical-modern debate dragged on for decades before
eventually being won by the modern-languages side. With theidealistic arguments in favor of World Englishes approaches notconvincing to many educators, administrators, and learners, and
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with the pedagogical feasibility and practical benefits of suchapproaches not yet known, the uncertainty about what typesof English should be taught in the second-language classroom
might last equally as long.

Notes
1. A comprehensive reference on the World Englishes paradigm is The
Handbook of World Englishes (B. B. Kachru, Y. Kachru, and C. L. Nelson(Eds.), 2009); the book’s first editor, Braj B. Kachru of the University of
Illinois, is often credited as the founder of the movement. A detailed
discussion of that paradigm in relation to the ESL classroom in Japan
can be found in Shiroza (2010).
2. Matsuda and Friedrich (2011), for example, propose curricula for English as an international language.
3. Sturm’s school is reminiscent of the growing number of international
schools and university programs in countries such as Japan and Korea
where the education is conducted entirely in English, even when mostof the students are natives of the local country.
4. A more thoughtful analysis of the classical-language tradition—one
which admits some positive aspects while being critical overall—is“The Theory of Classical Education” by Henry Sidgwick (1867).

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