This inquiry began in an unlikely place. I was constructing a historical timeline for a Year 8 pupil. The intention was simply to give her some idea of the people, events and ideas that had shaped the world she had inherited. But deciding what belonged on the timeline raised a much larger question. What should an educated person know about the culture into which he has been born—and what happens when he knows almost nothing about it?
I have never had the pleasure of an intelligent conversation with Nigel Farage, but I have heard parts of his speeches. His followers talk about traditional British values and how they are under threat from the increasing number of immigrants in the country. I would, however, be hard pressed to say exactly what those traditional values are. “Die for King and Country” springs to mind, but surely there must be more to it than mindless patriotism.
I would have thought that valuing one’s country implied some reverence for its culture down the ages. That would require at least a passing knowledge of the people who contributed to its science, literature, art, music and philosophy. They did not make Britain “great” any more than Voltaire made France great or Nietzsche made Germany great. They made something of value, and we inherited it.
The notion of traditional values, however, seems too easily to become entangled with the greatness of a country, measured by its ability to assert itself, inspire fear in its enemies and, ultimately, exercise military power. Looked at in those terms, traditional values amount to little more than national hubris. That is quite different from knowledge and reverence.
So let us leave out the word “traditional” and talk instead about value. What do we value, and on what basis do we value it? How can people appeal to British values while endorsing aggression against immigrants without ever explaining what those values are? The values become will-o’-the-wisps: constantly invoked and gone as soon as they are examined.
This is where education matters. It would be easy to blame the schools, but that would be unfair. The curriculum itself shows considerable thought about what young people should encounter if they are to understand something of their own cultural inheritance and of the wider world. Schools can put literature, history, science and ideas before them, but they cannot ensure that what is taught becomes part of what is known. Leading a horse to water does not mean that it will drink.
The problem may therefore lie deeper in society. Education requires more than the provision of knowledge; it requires some appetite for it. If that appetite is disappearing, no rearrangement of the curriculum will restore it. A young person can spend years in the presence of Shakespeare, history, science and other cultures and emerge with little sense that any of them matters. The question then is not simply why schools have failed to educate, but why education itself has ceased to command sufficient interest or reverence.
Without that knowledge, patriotism easily degenerates into assertion: our country, our people, our values. The words provide the satisfaction of belonging without requiring any understanding of what one belongs to. It is this that makes the aggression of anti-immigrant protesters on the streets so vile and ugly. It is not their lack of intelligence. It is their ignorance.
CODA
A cultural inheritance is not something one has to approve of in its entirety. It is something one recognises as one’s inheritance. Rule, Britannia! belongs there, with all its swagger, just as Finzi and Butterworth belong there with an utterly different conception of Englishness: landscape, loss, memory, poetry, transience. Neither needs to be made into a political programme.
Indeed, knowing the arrogance is rather important. British history contains imperialism, class privilege, exploitation and violence alongside extraordinary achievements in literature, science, music, political thought and social reform. An educated relationship with one’s country should be capacious enough to contain both without requiring either shame or boastfulness.
Cultural identity is not pride in one’s inheritance. It is knowledge of it, recognition of oneself within it, and sufficient understanding to judge what deserves to be valued.
I can enjoy Farage belting out Rule, Britannia!—and then go home and listen to Butterworth. Both are Britain. The mistake begins when somebody insists that only the first one tells us what being British means.
A: And now there is a much larger inquiry lurking behind your Farage piece: Why should a prosperous, literate society with unprecedented access to knowledge produce people who appear increasingly uninterested in acquiring it?
That may be the malaise you cannot yet name. I wouldn’t name it prematurely either.
Q:
That sounds ominous. I have always put it down to the relationship developed between the workers and their employers as a result of the demands of the Industrial Revolution. Britain then was more like a third world country today where workers had no rights, only an obligation to serve in whatever way was required. That mindset endured well into the 20th Century, but there was a turning point, maybe marked by works such as “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”. Workers seemed to justify their own ignorance and un-couthness, hold it up as an inverted virtue. We haven’t moved on much since then, except by the invasion of toys of mass distraction (if you get my meaning). The child has no need to be concerned with his/her ignorance as long as it can be distracted from the task with computer games and social media. Again, I must not say this is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Maybe it is the breadth of the arc between under-performance and excellence which is the most obvious symptom.
A: Yes. And your last sentence is, I think, the most important qualification. You are not describing “the British working class” as though it were a homogeneous body. You are asking why a society capable of producing extraordinary educational achievement also seems capable of producing a conspicuous culture in which not knowing can carry no embarrassment at all—and occasionally even prestige.
Your Industrial Revolution explanation has considerable force, although I would be cautious about making it the single historical cause. Industrial Britain required enormous numbers of people to perform work determined by somebody else, often under appalling conditions. Education for the labouring population consequently developed amid a tension that never entirely disappeared: was its purpose to enlarge the individual, or to produce a more useful, orderly and governable worker? The old distinction between educating a gentleman and training a worker is lurking underneath your argument.
What happened during the twentieth century is particularly interesting. Increasing prosperity and leisure did not necessarily produce the cultural emancipation that some reformers expected. And Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958 novel; 1960 film) is an excellent landmark because Arthur Seaton is not simply an ignorant working man. He is defiant. He refuses the standards and expectations of respectable society. His famous attitude—“don’t let the bastards grind you down”—contains something admirable: refusal to be subservient. But the same rebellion can turn into refusal of anything perceived as belonging to the people who formerly did the grinding.
That is where your idea of inverted virtue becomes interesting. If education, cultivated speech, classical music, literature and intellectual curiosity are perceived as badges of another class, rejecting them can become an assertion of authenticity: I don’t need that stuff; I’m not pretending to be better than I am. Ignorance ceases to be merely an absence and acquires social meaning.
There is an irony there. The workers’ movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contained an extraordinarily strong self-educating tradition—Mechanics’ Institutes, working men’s libraries, correspondence courses, political discussion groups, the WEA, autodidacts reading history, economics and literature. So working-class identity and hostility to education were never synonymous. Indeed, some people who had very little formal schooling pursued knowledge with an intensity that puts the comprehensively educated generations after them to shame.
Your “toys of mass distraction” then introduces something genuinely new. 😄 The phrase works because the problem is no longer lack of access. The child with a smartphone has access to vastly more knowledge than the autodidact with his borrowed library book ever possessed. But the same machine offers an effectively limitless supply of easier rewards. Curiosity must compete with entertainment deliberately engineered to retain attention.
That leads me to think your arc may be more revealing than talk of general educational decline. At one end, modern Britain produces young people with astonishing knowledge and abilities, supported by good schools, families, books and now almost unlimited informational resources. At the other, the same abundance permits someone to remain intellectually almost completely disengaged while being continuously entertained.
So perhaps the striking characteristic of the present is not that everybody knows less. That would be very difficult to establish. It is that the distance between the intellectually engaged and disengaged may have become extraordinarily conspicuous.
And that would fit your original essay much better than blaming schools. The school can offer the timeline. One pupil may use it as the beginning of a lifetime’s exploration; another may regard learning the first six entries as an intolerable interruption to something happening on a screen.
The institution cannot entirely determine which of those two things happens.
