hh, I know we could trade stories like this all day, but my recent shocker was encountering TOTAL bafflement when I asked why Debussy might have been especially sensitive to issues of French nationalism around 1915/16. I then asked for the dates of WWI. Not one person knew them. Rant, grump etc.

It's not only in educational establishments that this happens.  I dared to suggest (on TOP) that Mozart's straightened circumstances towards the end of his life (in 1791) might have had to do with the French Revolution (1789 ff) that closed-down the "culture industry" in France, and sent shivers across the whole of Europe (and resulted in a much-expected war with Austria soon after he died).  This was roundly booed-off in favour of preferred suspects like Salieri, the Freemasons etc...

How exactly does it prove that? Almost all cultures, certainly the Anglo/European and the Islamic, have produced both beauty and atrocity. One example of the latter is the idea of "superior" cultures. (What do you mean by "weighing all factors"? - applying a points system to Bush and Osama bin Laden to see which is more evil, or counting up nice things against nasty things in a "culture" and coming up with a tidy and objective answer? Come off it.) Acknowledging that is not getting one's knickers in a twist. I would prefer to celebrate the creative achievements of humanity and hope we can eventually grow out of the destructive ones. Dividing the species into "good" and "bad" cultures is not going to help the latter and does a gross disservice to the former.

I can only echo what Martle, Pim and Reiner say about general ignorance and the lack of "joined-up thinking". Again, excluding notation from education is not going to address this much larger problem; again, obviously it isn't intended to - it's a problem for some, for example those of us who are trying to make sense and reality of the idea of "higher" education, but it isn't a problem for our rulers, it's a solution.

Philidor, you are being highly disingenuous and selective in marshalling your evidence for "superiority" here, and I don't see what George Orwell has to do with it, but I can see that countering your arguments is a waste of time so I think I shall go and do something more interesting instead.

I wonder just how much of this general ignorance can be laid at the feet of the proliferation of TV stations leading to ghettoisation of material, and the availability of cheap televisions, so that should a child wish to see cartoons all his waking hours, it's perfectly possible for him to stay apart from the rest of the family and soak up escapist animation, for example. When there were far fewer stations and one set in the house, the family would tend to watch together, and the range of material viewed would cover many more subjects. Now that the media feed on themselves, kids can tell you all about Big Brother, Buffy, or Duffy without having the faintest idea about the planet they inhabit. What happens in East Enders has much more impact on their world than what is happening in Eastern Europe.

As I said I am not interested in taking part in this argument (although I notice you now say "some cultural practices are better than others", with which I have already agreed, rather than drawing the specious conclusion that therefore some cultures are better than others, according to some gruesome algebra or other), but I will say that as far as I am concerned Baudrillard and his ilk represent "philosophy" as irresponsible and attention-seeking tabloid journalism, and my brain may be soft but it is hardened against that sort of thing.

Ron, without wishing to seem too predictable, I think the TV phenomenon you're talking about and the shrinkage of education are more like two symptoms of the same underlying logic than being causally related.

Quite so, with the additional irony that algebra - and indeed mathematics in general - are among those aspects of what we think of as Western culture that were kept alive in the Islamic world during the "dark ages" in the West.  More generally, show me the objective axioms against which a comparison between cultures can be made, and demonstrate that they are free from value-judgements, and there might be the basis for such an argument.  Actually, that's where the whole idiot apparatus of post-modernism falls down; strip away the jargon and it's little more than an apologia for the ideological values of free-market capitalism.

A couple of thoughts from this discussion:

To return to education: the paradox, it seems to me, is that in schools the students seem to work harder and harder to learn less and less, in terms of what I would term "humanistic" knowledge.  I agree with Richard; education is increasingly seen in terms of economic purpose - children in uniform sitting behind desks being prepared for a life of sitting in uniform behind desks - and the really good teachers are those who, in the face of remorseless targets and testing, manage to broaden the outlooks of those who have the will to look beyond that.  I always liked Ivan Illich's definition of education as "growth in disciplined dissidence".  But in terms of the various types of peer pressure, the cultural pressures that Ron alludes to, and economic pressures it becomes increasingly difficult to allow that.


Not just watched, but discussed.  And I think we are, in our comfortable Western society, isolated from world events; growing up in wartime, what my parents heard Alvar Liddell reading on the wireless was directly related to the bomb crater at the end of the road, the telegram being delivered to the house across the way.  Now there is no engagement, no real empathy, in events; perhaps the current economic problems, or in the longer term the realities of climate change, will alter that.