Wednesday, 18th February 2009
Sandwell Council recently advertised for a ‘Thematic Liaison Manager (Performance)’ at £41,000 a year.
Sandwell Council recently advertised for a ‘Thematic Liaison
Manager (Performance)’ at £41,000 a year. It would be instructive if
any reader could tell from that description what the job entailed. I
doubt anyone could, and thereby hangs a tale.
Latin was the language of learning in the West for more than 1,000
years after the fall of the western Roman empire in the 5th century ad.
When it began to be replaced by vernaculars and translations, some
other justification for it had to be found. One common one was that it
gave you an entrée into the world of those who had done Latin at
school, i.e. a highly restricted, socially dominant male hierarchy. It
did not matter if your knowledge of the language was minimal or you
never used it again. You had done it and were therefore a ‘gentleman’.
That was enough to provide you with the passport. The result was that
Latin became a sort of bourgeois certificate of authenticity, its very
uselessness the mark of a truly liberal, superior education and, as a
consequence, a language of power, bolstering the prestige of those who
had learned it (however much they had forgotten or never known) and
commanding the respect of those who did not, all the more effectively
for being unintelligible.
That being the case, it was essential that Latin be kept from the
masses. It might encourage them to rise above their station, abandon
occupations like trade and manufacture for which they were ‘naturally’
qualified and strive for those for which they were not. Social mobility
was not to be encouraged: a Frenchman argued, ‘For every few happy
talents that such education drags usefully out of their primary state,
how many mediocrities pick up tastes from it that are incompatible with
the modest condition to which they will have to return.’ The learning
of Latin not merely excluded, it defined the unfit.
And so to our Thematic Liaison Manager (Performance), and almost
every job advertised in the public sector. For all the sense they make,
they may as well be written in Latin. With their pompous talk of
‘strategy partnerships’, ‘management frameworks’, ‘senior
stakeholders’, ‘multi-agency working’ and all the rest, they not only
put up a large ‘No entry’ sign to anyone who is not a club member, they
also imply that only people like them could do such fantastically
important jobs.