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Eng lit 2002
What it’s like to teach literature in multicultural technocratic England: Teachers, targets and theatre trips. Taking schoolchildren to the theater becomes impossibly difficult when there are no standards, so you can’t expect people to behave right and keeping the kids safe becomes an infinitely complex task. So you don’t bother doing it. Back in the classroom, the settled humane standards needed to discuss literature require a setting in some particular culture, which is no longer allowed to exist. In the absence of such a setting “literature” becomes an arbitrarily chosen text, “study” formal analysis, and the point of the exercise bureaucratic certification of competence. So what teachers do is pick a passage or two from Romeo and Juliet that they know will be on the national test and spend the year drilling students in how to answer the questions likely to be asked. Not much fun, even if you ignore problems with disruptive students and the rest of it. Why does anyone still bother? Posted by Jim Kalb at December 20, 2002 10:26 AM | Send Comments
To sum up Mr. Kalb’s points: In the absence of accepted common moral standards, ordinary human activity must be bureaucratized. In the absence of a legitimate particular culture, culture must be bureaucratized. There are no substitutes for the accepted authority of transcendent moral standards and the accepted authority of a particular culture. In their absence appears nihilism, the only “legitimate” response to which is bureaucratic rule. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 20, 2002 12:24 PMLarry Auster said, “To sum up Mr. Kalb’s points: In the absence of accepted common moral standards, ordinary human activity must be bureaucratized. In the absence of a legitimate particular culture, culture must be bureaucratized. “There are no substitutes for the accepted authority of transcendent moral standards and the accepted authority of a particular culture. In their absence appears nihilism, the only ‘legitimate’ response to which is bureaucratic rule.” Which is why bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic by and large like the way things have been trending — it increases their power. Posted by: Unadorned on December 20, 2002 12:43 PM |