Educated fools
From Dr P.G. Urben Sir: The least effectual and less learned denizens of academe love to contrast the mediaeval purities of gentlemanly educa- tion with today's vocationalism (`The edu- cation swindle' by Duke Maskell, 5 August). Rigorous reasoners as they were, the scholars of the Middle Ages would scarcely have swallowed such claptrap.
The Western European university is a concept which slightly antedates the redis- covery of Greek attitudes, let alone the Victorian idea of liberal education. The mediaeval gentleman knew that academic study was for plebs on the make, and did not attend. Law and medicine, nothing if not vocations, were in the universities from the start. Music is a Tekne. In a world where all intellectual careers were within the Church, even theology looks suspicious- ly vocational. Mathematics was, perforce, far more utilitarian than today, for much of our school syllabus had yet to be discov- ered. Astronomy was a near-market applied science (we have long since aban- doned astronomy for surveying and time- keeping, but astronavigation went out well within my memory). Nor does the modern university teach anything quite so blatantly impure as rhetoric — which may be why the contemporary professoriat are so easily taken in by hype and bullshit.
Bullshit baffles brains, they say. Not where reason rules: Bullshit only baffles Educated fools!
Which we produce in large numbers, per- haps from education simultaneously shallow and specialised, but not because vocational. P.G. Urben
Pittenweem, Fife
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