Posted on 06/26/2006 5:09:07 AM PDT by ProCivitas
The sixth form fights back William Rees-Mogg
As long as ministers prefer Wayne Rooney to Isaac Newton, Britain's literary heritage will never be safe
IN THE SECOND half of the 19th century, English public schools fell under the spell of athletic prestige. Both masters and boys were encouraged to admire the “muddied oafs” of the first XV or the first XI. Correspondingly they tended to look down on the scholars of the sixth form. This anti- intellectualism is well described in the memoirs of those scholars, such as Robert Graves’s brilliant account of pre-1914 Charterhouse, Goodbye To All That. I feel sure that Graves’s description was accurate; my father was at the school at the same time, and experienced the same exaggerated worship of games players. The effect was to infantilise the school, with senior masters joining in the athletic hero-worship which may be natural for 14-year-olds but is not for grown-ups.
(.By the time I went to Charterhouse, in the early 1940s, two reforming headmasters, Frank Fletcher and Robert Birley, had counterattacked this cult of games. We enjoyed the successes of our school teams, and Charterhouse had in Peter May one of the greatest batsmen of all time, but there was no tendency to worship even the best players, or to rate success in games above the pursuit of knowledge. The Victorian cult of games was no more than a rather disagreeable memory. That remained the case until the present day.
Modern England seems to have reacquired some of the characteristics of the late Victorian public schools. The Prime Minister, with his breezy manner, has an easy charm when talking to the boys; he is like one of the clerical headmasters of the 1890s. His best speeches resemble little sermons. He exhorts us all to pull up our socks, show house spirit, obey the rules and demonstrate what the Victorians believed to be the Christian virtues of keenness and industry. He admires athletes, but is inclined to think that sixth-form boys should get out of their stuffy libraries and breathe some good fresh air. He encourages his house masters, some of whom are pretty dim, to impose endless petty restrictions.
This has never been a congenial atmosphere for those who do not share late Victorian attitudes. Sooner or later a reaction was bound to follow. Last weekend saw the sixth form answer back. Protest was written by the right person for the right journal.
Nicolas Barker is the hero of bookmen everywhere. He has worked in serious publishing; he has held a senior position at the British Library; he is an expert in the conservation of books; he has written his own excellent books; he has protected and edited The Book Collector for more than a generation; and he is respected as a fine scholar.
His article appeared in Friday’s Times Literary Supplement. (...)
Mr Barker was, however, told a real truth by one civil servant with whom he negotiated. “When it comes to priorities you have to read DCMS backwards: Sport before Media, Media before Culture.” That is proved by the statistics of funding. “Between 2001 and 2006, the DCMS will have increased funding for sport by 91 per cent, the arts by 63 per cent, and museums, libraries and archives by 26 per cent.” A report by the London School of Economics suggests that museums, libraries and archives have nothing less to do but “prepare for an orderly management of decline”.
This article's general topic, of sports cultism in schools, has obvious application in our country. Interesting that in Britain this scholastic 'sports cultism' arose during the generational prelude to World War One (probably the largest pointless horror in history, upon which others hinged). It gets one to thinking about the connection between that sort of cultural conditioning in schools, and acquiescence to public policy horror.
The general topic of 'social conditioning' and distraction is an important one.
"The Bread's o.k, but the Circuses could stand some improvement."--ProCivitas 5/2006
The "Cult of Games", I would suggest, was preferible to the 1920-1930s cult of the coward and effete that hid its eyes from Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco and the rest -- and that Evelyn Waugh eviscerated in Brideshead Revisited
I've long thought that generally the best foreign policy is a 'Defender' policy ('Sheepdog policy'?), preferably in concert with other nations similarly dedicated. The history and ethical reasoning for such policy might be a good topic in schools, and (had it been the general cultural understanding throughout the 20th Century)would have stopped the atrocity of both World Wars and others. A genuinely educated public is probably not easily mislead by a degenerate 'leadership community'.
I've long thought that generally the best foreign policy is a 'Defender' policy ('Sheepdog policy'?), preferably in concert with other nations similarly dedicated. The history and ethical reasoning for such policy might be a good topic in schools, and (had it been the general cultural understanding throughout the 20th Century)would have stopped the atrocity of both World Wars and others. A genuinely educated public is probably not easily mislead by a degenerate 'leadership community'.
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