MY subject is tragedy, contemporary tragedy. Our editor pointed out in her last Sunday’s review that our most valuable, historic and formerly cherished institutions are being destroyed – sometimes by a neglect born of colossal ignorance, but increasingly by deliberate policy formed out of malice, a vicious hatred for our history and for everything that has made us the people we are. We are witnessing the twilight of our institutions. So we need to know first what an institution is.
Political parties come and go. Institutions are – or used to be – what transcend mere political opinions. They are above the noise and traffic of the daily squabble. They were carved with pain out of violent quarrels and even civil wars. Institutions are the stuff of ancient compromises which persist to give life and freedom to the whole of society. Institutions are the remedy for sectarianism. We have institutions so that we do not die of politics. Institutions are not political theories: they are quite simply the way we do things; the refined habits of our civilisation. They are our words made flesh, incarnated.
Today these institutions and the society, culture and civilisation they create are undermined, perhaps fatally. Let me speak today of one of the greatest of all our institutions: education.
In 1948 T S Eliot wrote in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture: ‘The universities of Europe should have their common ideals. They should have their obligations towards each other. They should be independent of the governments of the countries in which they are situated. They should not be institutions for the training of an efficient bureaucracy, or for equipping scientists to get the better of foreign scientists. They should stand for the preservation of learning, for the pursuit of truth, and, in so far as men are capable of it, the attainment of wisdom.’
But how can wisdom even be discussed when there are university courses in literary theory which claim that when Christina Rossetti wrote a poem about the sea, she was really writing about feminism and racism, or that the racist and sexist Shakespeare is best studied (if you must!) in Romanian because his English language gets in the way of understanding him? What can you expect when the new regulations about A-levels say that ‘candidates are permitted to see their marked scripts, but there shall be no comments on them. No script may be annotated in any way, with tick, cross, comment, explanation or opinion either in pencil or ink. Spelling mistakes must not be corrected’?
I’m not making this up. I have been re-reading one of the first books about this mess by Duke Maskell and Ian Robinson, two university teachers of English, in The New Idea of a University (2001). The authors list some of the comical new degree courses now on special offer in the supermarket of learning, including ‘asset-management, beauty therapy, consumer studies, costume, make-up, counselling, marketing or tourism with early childhood studies, fashion, golf studies, hospitality management, perfumery, turf science, cosmetic science . . .’
But it’s all cosmetic. Courses of this type are precisely what a real university should teach us to reject. But universities today are not centres of excellence – how could they be when excellence itself, like elitism, is a dirty word? The purpose of the modern university, as it defines itself, is to produce ‘key skills to benefit the economy and to promote growth’.
Of course, there is a place where those subjects might be taught – but that place is not the university. Maskell and Robinson explain how this ruination of higher education has come about, not only by the emergence of an illiterate, unteachable yobbish underclass but by ‘the plebification not just of the ruling but the educated class’.
Example: a former Culture Secretary – but we laughed when we saw Joseph Goebbels in that job. Anyhow, the day before yesterday’s reincarnation of Dr Goebbels was asked whether Taylor Swift’s music was as good as Beethoven’s and he replied: ‘I wouldn’t want to establish hierarchies. We mustn’t discriminate.’
But there are hierarchies and it is the quality of the likes of Beethoven who decide who is at the top and who is at the bottom. Discrimination is the virtuous faculty by which we distinguish between quality and rubbish. But discrimination is now only taboo in a diseased society bewitched by those pseudo-realities, equality and diversity.
Education’s chief aim must be to enable rationality and critical awareness in pupils and students, but these institutions of learning reward tosh and punish – they call it ‘cancelling’ – common sense. Incidentally, those we used to regard as people with common sense are now disdained as diseased members of the ‘far right’. Many teachers have been sacked or otherwise had their careers curtailed recently. I have space to give you only the flavour of the ideological purge that is taking place.
Heather Brunskell‑Evans of King’s College London was no‑platformed after discussing transgender issues on a radio show. The 2019–2020 Policy Exchange Reports warned of a growing crisis in academic freedom, with conservative or gender‑critical academics self‑censoring in order to avoid the sack. Between 2020 and 2023 scores of academics appeared on the Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF) Banned List which documents individuals who were banned from speaking, disciplined, threatened with dismissal or dismissed for their views on gender, race, or identity politics.
In 2024 there was a surge in high‑profile cases when Dance FM Live named ten academics who were cancelled. The Daily Mail’s report on university cuts and woke hiring of April 2024 found that universities had cut hundreds of lecturers while expanding woke diversity roles.
Meanwhile, in state schools we see near-perfection as new highs are attained each succeeding year in the exam passes. It is almost impossible to fail an A-level. In 2024 – the latest year for which figures are available – just 1.5 per cent of entrants managed to fail, which only shows that a pass is worthless. Never has more money been spent on UK schools – £85billion at the last count – yet, even according to the Department of Education’s own figures, too many young people leave school after 11 years of compulsory education functionally illiterate and innumerate. This is not hostile propaganda from the far right. The exact formulation appeared in an article in the educational establishment’s signal publication Tes (formerly known as the Times Educational Supplement) as early as 2010 – when the problem was not so acute – which stated: ‘Around a fifth of pupils leave school functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate.’
Eliot sums up the consequences when we corrupt and finally destroy an institution which was meant to sustain us: ‘We are told now that the highest achievements of the past in art, in wisdom, in holiness were but “stages in development” which we can teach our youngsters to improve upon. We are told we must not impose traditional culture upon the young, though we may impose upon them whatever political and social philosophy is in vogue. There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everyone we are lowering standards, destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian hordes will encamp in their mechanised caravans.’
Eliot didn’t live to see the hordes of barbarian opportunists who arrive on our shores. But he knew we have a surfeit of the barbarism which is entirely home-grown.
