Sheila Lawlor is at it over on Comment Is Free, pulling the old trick of defining something (in this case, Michael Gove's curriculum changes) as "liberalisation" in order to cast as illiberal any opposition to it.
Dr Lawlor rightly bemoans the absence of the teaching of Latin, but she seems completely oblivious to the reason for it: the worship of big business that she and her think tank promote, which requires the organisation of education, or at least of publicly funded education, to that interest's largely philistine, wholly "utilitarian" specifications.
Conservative or capitalist, but you cannot be both.
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Good points, Mr. Lindsay. What is conservatism supposed to conserve, if it does not conserve the best parts of our culture?
ReplyDeleteI have noticed that businessmen have a very negative opinion of such "useless" subjects, such as the Classics. Unfortunately, most people seem to have absorbed these prejudices, as they seem rather commonplace.
I am all for teaching people useful skills, but why can't that be done alongside a humane education? In the past, people could understand allusions to all kinds of classical subjects, and they could be found everywhere, even in newspaper comic strips. Otto Messmer used to reference Jupiter Pluvius frequently in his "Felix the Cat" strips.