I beg to differ with Mr Bines’ comments (“What happened to integration,” Opinion, June 1) concerning the building of a Greek school in Enfield and the effect it would have in integrating the Greek community.

Mr Bines is obviously not a classical scholar; the teaching of Greek as a classical language was reserved for the English elite and their offspring studying at Oxford and Cambridge and it was an entry requirement that undergraduates had a basic knowledge of the language.

The Greek language is the language of philosophers, scientists, astronomers, poets, and politicians. Democracy, human rights, ideas on equality freedom and peace which make every Englishman proud to be English, originate in ancient Greece.

Even the very word “idea” is Greek, which means “forming a pattern of thought.”

This island was given its ancient name, Albion, by the Greek geographer Pynthias around 325BCE. Western civilisation and Europe’s transformation was based on two things — the Renaissance and the fall of Constantinople, which led to the rediscovery of the knowledge of the ancient Greeks from Athens and the Alexandrian schools, and then the Reformation which loosened the stifling grip of the Catholic and other Christian churches on what the population at large was able to think.

Together these two factors freed the European peoples’ imaginations to experiment.

I think there should be a campaign to introduce the Greek language into state schools, taught as a second language.

This would help create an enlightened generation and perhaps a better world.

Peter Attard
Gladbeck Road, Enfield