No end of a lesson
Theodore Dalrymple
ALL MUST HAVE PRIZES by Melanie Phillips Little, Brown, £17.50, pp. 288 Last week, I asked a girl aged 15 to multiply three by nine. One could almost hear the whirrings of the Heath Robinson machinery in her mind as she pondered this immensely difficult question. Eventual- ly, after a minute or two, she came up with the answer: 31.
I soon established that she could read or rather recognise — only a few single- syllable words. 'I don't know that one,' she said, pointing to the word 'every'. One might have supposed that English was writ- ten not alphabetically but pictographically.
I asked her what she learnt at school.
`Malls, English and child development,' she replied.
At such moments, one doesn't know whether to laugh or pull one's hair out, or do a little of both at the same time. My despair was compounded when I learnt that she, whose own mother was only 30 years old, thought that the solution to her problem of boredom and alienation was to have a baby.
If one were trying to devise an educa- tional system which would ensure that the poorest 20 per cent of the population remained mired in poverty and ignorance, without hope of improvement, while simul- taneously pretending to be deeply con- cerned for their welfare and providing large-scale employment for members of the middle classes who have intellectual aspira- tions without the corresponding talents, one would devise something closely resem- bling the English one. It is deeply conserva- tive (as amber conserves flies) and threatens to impoverish us all, both eco- nomically and culturally. It is to Melanie Phillips' great credit that she has tackled this problem of abysmal educational and cultural standards — the most serious problem by far confronting British society, besides which all our other problems are trivial — head-on, and has linked it to the demoralisation of British society brought about by its intellectual elite. She cites chapter and verse from the works of 'progressive' educationists whose ideas would be laughable had they not already laid needless waste to millions of young lives. These educationists speak of new literacies rather than literacy, by which they mean, au fond, the ability to switch on a video machine rather than the ability to read a piece of unseen text. These educa- tionists refuse to make value judgments about cultural artefacts; for them, all human activities are of equal worth, and so children are not to be guided in one direc- tion rather than another, which for them— would be a manifestation of bourgeois authoritarianism. The unstructured nature of English education leaves children both bewildered and egotistical, without intellectual or practical interests or abilities, without moral bearings and utterly cultureless. They are mentally capable of responding only to the most degraded commercial products, such as M-TV. They are left unable to concentrate, entirely unreflective and unself-critical, and intolerant of any authority other than their own whim. This is because child-centred learning treats children as if they were themselves authori- ties merely by virtue of drawing breath. The individual wretchedness which results is apparently of no concern whatever to those who have helped to bring it about.
Melanie Phillips tells the lamentable story of how the Government, with a dim apprehension that something was wrong, was easily outflanked in its attempts at reform by those who have undertaken the long march through the institutions and have now arrived at the pinnacles of influ- ence and power. The government lacked the courage, the nous or the interest to force through the necessary root and branch reform.
The author writes from a very proper sense of outrage which (for once in this age of the simulated variety) is entirely justi- fied. It is truly outrageous that the lives of millions of young people have been blight- ed to satisfy the vanity and lust for power of a class of intellectual malcontents. Their publicly proclaimed refusal to make value judgments about different ways of life, while personally cleaving to many of the old standards, has been a means not only of preserving but of increasing their own power. Their refusal to extend to the rest of the population the advantages which they themselves have enjoyed is not a mis- take: it is evil.
Much of what is written in this book is perfectly obvious, and will surprise only the kind of ideologically blinkered person who would have travelled to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and failed to notice that it was a tyranny of an exceptionally complete kind. But to say the obvious now requires consid- erable courage, and the author has it in full. For a Guardian and Observer journalist to defend the values of culture and educa- tion against barbarism and ignorance now invites vituperation of a particularly vicious nature, and the author has received it. She has been attacked with ignorant savagery by Colin MacCabe, Melvyn Bragg, Tessa Blackstone et al, whose liberal complacency makes Mr Podsnap appear like a model of self-doubting vacillation. They are the kind of people who would go to Manchester and return to write a book entitled Moss Side: A New Civilisation.
Much of this book does not make for pleasant reading. The trahison des clercs is both serious and dull. But it is essential reading for anyone who cares for the future of this country.
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