'Learning maths is even more pointless than Latin'

This interesting article by Simon Jenkins in today's Guardian is a refreshing diatribe against mathematics. 

I wonder what subjects schools should teach. What come to mind immediately are: driving, typing, religious instruction (as opposed to religious education), cooking, history, literature, especially poetry (but nothing after 1945 please), German and at least one other language, probably Spanish or Russian (and teach lots of grammar rather than trying to get thirty boys to make conversation), history of art, useful non-team sports like tennis that people will actually play in adult life and, most important of all, psychology. 

The most important are the life lessons taught by other children in the playground - and these can be incredibly painful for children who do not fit in.  Philip Larkin put it well.

When I was at school I thought I hated the human race, but when I grew up I realised it was just children I couldn't stand.

It would be much better to skip these often very damaging playground lessons which are a form of child abuse. If you can afford a private tutor for your child, get one. In Bucharest they are affordable.

In fact, a lot of schooling can now be done at home over the internet which is the best place for children to learn but if I am right we should need to decide whether schools are necessary to educate children or to enable mothers to go out to work. There is no longer much need for many universities. Most universities should become virtual and teach largely online. This will enable a much wider access to university - to everyone of any age, class, nationality and educational achievement who has sufficient access to the net. There should only remain a few major universities in each country, for educating a small academically-minded elite and for conducting research. Such universities should only teach real subjects and this would not include vocational subjects like law or medicine, or still less that trahison des clercs 'business education'.

I think teaching comparative religion to British schoolchildren instead of Christianity (or another religion if the school is Jewish or Muslim) was the most significant development of that very socially liberal decade the 1980s and will have immensely far-reaching and disastrous consequences.

I do not agree with Simon Jenkins that teaching Latin is necessarily a bad idea, unless like me you were taught using the Cambridge Latin Course and therefore not taught to write Latin. If you are taught by that accursed course, which is still widely used, and get a grade A at A Level, as I did, you still cannot read Latin - or not without a crib. So what is the point? My school gave me a choice between German, Latin and Russian as the second foreign language and I wish I had learnt Russian instead of Latin. If I had, I could now read Pushkin in the original and make myself understood in Samarkand or Yerevan.

In any case, Latin should just be for the fairly few children (few boys at least, more girls) who have literary tastes (as should most courses at universities, come to that, except for maths and the hard sciences). Latin should be accompanied by Greek, which gives you very many more good things to read. Latin literature is overrated. One learns a language to read poetry, as prose can be translated. Catullus is wonderful, I must reread Horace now that I am the age to enjoy him, Virgil and Ovid are very good indeed but none are as good as Shakespeare and English literature has many more great poets than Latin. Latin, though, is enormously influential. Ovid begat Shakespeare, for example. So there is a case for teaching Latin, though not an overwhelmingly strong one. The same is true of maths.

Writing this rigmarole, I am put in mind of the Mock Turtle:

'We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—'
'I'VE been to a day-school, too,' said Alice; 'you needn't be so proud as all that.'
'With extras?' asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.
'Yes,' said Alice, 'we learned French and music.'
'And washing?' said the Mock Turtle.
'Certainly not!' said Alice indignantly.
'Ah! then yours wasn't a really good school,' said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief.

These words are uttered sublimely by Sir John Gielgud here.