Can the philistine supremacy be stopped?

Oppose the priests of ignorance!

News of the philistine supremacy keeps coming. It’s one of the most persistent stories of the moment. And it’s getting worse.

Along with teachers organisations in the US calling for schools to “de-center” books, teachers in the UK calling for Shakespeare to be removed from the curriculum, we now have Oxford University, of all places, removing the requirement for Classics undergraduates—the ones studying Latin and Greek—to read the whole of the Aeneid or Iliad. Instead, they will study selected extracts of the Odyssey.

And a UK government curriculum review is being told that taking school-children to the theatre and on museum trips is “middle-class” and “alienating”. Instead, they should tour football stadiums and take graffiti workshops. The professor of social mobility who proposes these changes, Lee Elliot Major, wants pupils to learn about figures like Michael Faraday and Mary Anning, and to remove middle-class bias from exam questions.

Those are smart ideas. Skiing references in exam questions are doubtless unneeded and potentially alienating. Of course children should know about Michael Faraday and Mary Anning. But all children should also go to the theatre and to museums. Knowledge is a route to social mobility.

When the actor Patrick Stewart was a boy he lived in a working class neighbourhood in Yorkshire. There were two rooms in his house—and four books. No hot water. No inside toilet. At school he discovered Shakespeare, introduced to it by two teachers. Word went round the community that he was interested in the plays and in acting. One day there was a knock at the door.