Having a bit of a think about John Lloyd's closing sentences to his piece What price education? in the 'Life & Arts' section of today's Weekend FT. In his closing paragraph, Lloyd summarises two beliefs: first, that a "rational-liberal education" can be trusted to deliver, and secondly, that such an education's underlying principles are being eroded so that protest is appropriate (this is my over-brief summary; the article's worth reading).
Then we get those closing sentences. Lloyd writes of these two beliefs: "Both are, at root, principled. Both cannot be right."
Is that a problem? It's not that I disagree. It's just that I think rightness is over-valued these days. If one lot has to be right, the other lot has to be wrong, and there's no scope for compromise. More importantly, no allowance for the basic truth that nobody knows what's going to happen next. Nor for the impossibility of knowing (clearly, with an "objective" understanding) what's happening now, nor indeed for the not-quite-infinite variety of educators delivering that education.
What constitutes leaving an education alone, and what constitutes intervention, if that education is based on a syllabus determined and devised by - I could go too far with this, but I doubt that any current debate comes down to a binary right/wrong. Because the future kicks in. Change. Events, right?
I've been enjoying a revived spat on Facebook about Brexit. Not because any of the arguments are new, nor changed in any way from the arguments of last Summer (or, strictly, the Summer before), but because it's a subject on which so many people feel competent to make forward-looking statements about what the future holds now that we've voted out.
Some of them may be right. Sterling's fall may indeed be good/bad, and there may indeed be dastardly "brexiteers" lurking in the undergrowth. But I don't know. And nor does anybody else. And so many other things have happened since then, that might have an impact on the future, that it's getting a little strange to go on insisting that the Brexit vote is the single positive/negative causative event that will determine all our futures. What do all the protest votes tell us about the belief systems at the heart of all this?
Incidentally, somewhere in the depths of the Weekend FT, there's a genius at work. Title given given to a review of Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere (Little, Brown): 'Mothering heights'. Liked that. Just one example for now, but somebody there is good at titles.
And while we're on about right/wrong, here's the line from F Scott Fitzgerald that I was trying to fit in earlier: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." If that's true, it's difficult to see how a first-rate mind could get anywhere these days.
Then we get those closing sentences. Lloyd writes of these two beliefs: "Both are, at root, principled. Both cannot be right."
Is that a problem? It's not that I disagree. It's just that I think rightness is over-valued these days. If one lot has to be right, the other lot has to be wrong, and there's no scope for compromise. More importantly, no allowance for the basic truth that nobody knows what's going to happen next. Nor for the impossibility of knowing (clearly, with an "objective" understanding) what's happening now, nor indeed for the not-quite-infinite variety of educators delivering that education.
What constitutes leaving an education alone, and what constitutes intervention, if that education is based on a syllabus determined and devised by - I could go too far with this, but I doubt that any current debate comes down to a binary right/wrong. Because the future kicks in. Change. Events, right?
I've been enjoying a revived spat on Facebook about Brexit. Not because any of the arguments are new, nor changed in any way from the arguments of last Summer (or, strictly, the Summer before), but because it's a subject on which so many people feel competent to make forward-looking statements about what the future holds now that we've voted out.
Some of them may be right. Sterling's fall may indeed be good/bad, and there may indeed be dastardly "brexiteers" lurking in the undergrowth. But I don't know. And nor does anybody else. And so many other things have happened since then, that might have an impact on the future, that it's getting a little strange to go on insisting that the Brexit vote is the single positive/negative causative event that will determine all our futures. What do all the protest votes tell us about the belief systems at the heart of all this?
Incidentally, somewhere in the depths of the Weekend FT, there's a genius at work. Title given given to a review of Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere (Little, Brown): 'Mothering heights'. Liked that. Just one example for now, but somebody there is good at titles.
And while we're on about right/wrong, here's the line from F Scott Fitzgerald that I was trying to fit in earlier: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." If that's true, it's difficult to see how a first-rate mind could get anywhere these days.