Mass literacy has three primary effects. First, it subjects all taste and standards to the lowest common denominator test, making Dickens more important than Tennyson and ultimately reducing literary entertainment to the level of comic books and movies based on comic books; second, this destruction of standards encourages the counter-revolution of prissiness and sophistication, dividing the reading public into fans of Ruskin and fans of Marie Corelli; and third, it destroys real folk culture–old timey fiddle music, story telling, quilt making–and replaces it with manufactured mass culture that degrades a previously decent population of illiterates and turns them into mass consumers of junk and filth. It has got to the point that most of what is available in a public library or chain book store should be burned, not so much because it is pornographic as because it is stupid.
His response to someone else's remarks concerning reform:
In any discussion of reforming a custom or institution or skill, , the first question to ask is not “What do we do now?”–in this instance, should we start a campaign to promote illiteracy–but, “What is the proper functioning of the custom, that is, what purpose does it serve?” Next, we should want to know how it is being misused, and only then propose alternatives.It has been a while since I looked at Peter Hitchens's blog, and when I looked yesterday I found something concerning university education: Is university really such a good thing? I spent three years learning to be a Trot
Now, in the case of literacy, we might agree on a few objectives–the transmission of sacred texts, cultural traditions, etc., and might then agree that exposing the unthinking majority to mind-destroying junk and radical agitation has been a bad thing. What to do about it is quite another question. In one sense, the question is rather moot. Fewer and fewer people even read the newspapers or Clive Cussler novels, since their brains have been so rattled by TV and the Internet. I had a brief conversation with a 20-something high school graduate the other day, and when she asked me something about TV shows, I confessed I didn’t know because I don’t have a television set that can do anything but play movies. Her response was charming: “I don’t know what I’d do without TV.” I suggested in the kindest possible tone: “Live.” “What was that?” “You could just live instead of watching what is not real life on television.”
Although Mr. Maxwell is technicallly correct that plumbers and other working men are not truly proletarian, they have adopted much of the character of the proletariat: They have lost their roots, for the most part, are hedonistic and self-seeking even within the context of the family; they are not responsible for themselves and their families but expect either a company or the government to take care of them; and, from what I have observed of too many of them, they are not especially honest. Stealing from an employer or cheating on taxes is just what people do. By the way, NPGM’s point was made prophetically by RL Dabney nearly 150 years ago, when he argued against public education in Virginia, predicting that it would expose poor farmers and working men to political propaganda. As little as I like Calvinists, I have always regarded Dabney with a respect bordering on awe.
Mr. Maxwell is even more correct, though, when he says we can not simply turn back–though I doubt that an instant plunge into illiteracy could much depress the character of Americans. I think of a very wise book that is often criticized by traditionalist Catholics, Rosmini’s Five Wounds of the Church, in which he criticized the ignorance and corruption of the clergy and the superstition of the Catholic laymen who could not follow the Latin of the mass. His solution was not to Protestantize the Church and give up Latin, but to raise the standards in the seminaries and teach better Latin in the grammar schools. So portion of the American people sort of know how to read and do not wish to be entirely ignorant or unlettered. Forget about educating the rest and concentrate on the educable. This means working through private schools, church schools, home-schooling groups to raise their standards–which for the most part are lower than the standards of small-town public schools in the 1950s.
Finally, there is the point I raised earlier, that in an economic system that requires specialized training, whether in business techniques or medicine, real education will have to be reserved for the middle and high schools. One cannot wait for college to study English, foreign languages, and history. Much or most of what kids learn in school today is either valueless or pernicious. Any decent headmaster or parent can begin to remedy this situation today, and anyone out of college can be made to understand that it is time to begin his real education today. I had hoped that we here could be of some assistance to all these groups, but what I have found is that the more time I spend on helping others to cultivate their own minds, the less I have to do my own work. What we need are collaborators, intelligent and well-intentioned teachers who can help us with some of the work.
For many people, college is a corrupting, demoralising experience. They imagine they are independent when they are in fact parasites, living off their parents or off others and these days often doomed to return home with a sense of grievance and no job. They also become used to being in debt – a state that previous generations rightly regarded with horror and fear.
And they pass through the nasty, sordid rite of passage known as ‘Freshers’ Week’, in which they are encouraged to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol and to lose what’s left of their sexual inhibitions after the creepy sex educators have got at them at school. If they have learned self-disciplined habits of work and life, they are under pressure to forget all about them, suddenly left alone in a world almost completely stripped of authority.
And if they are being taught an arts subject, they will find that their courses are crammed with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-traditional material. Proper literature is despised and ‘deconstructed’. Our enviable national history is likewise questioned, though nothing good is put in its place.
Even if they are studying something serious, their whole lives will be dominated by assumptions of political correctness, down to notices in the bars warning against ‘homophobia’ and other thought crimes.
I think this debauching of the minds and bodies of the young is more or less deliberate. The horrible liberal Woodrow Wilson, who eventually became President of the United States, was originally an academic who once blurted out the truth as seen by many such people. He said in a rare moment of candour: ‘Our aim is to turn out young men as unlike their fathers as possible.’
Well, look at the modern world as governed by graduates who despise their fathers’ views, and what do you see? Idealist wars that slaughter millions, the vast corruption of the welfare state, the war on the married family – and in this country the almost total disappearance of proper manufacturing industry.
Rather than putting an entire generation in debt, the time has come to close most of our universities and shrink the rest so they do what they are supposed to do – educating an elite in the best that has ever been written, thought and said, and undertaking real hard scientific research.
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