COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
THE FOLLOWING
ARTICLE FROM THE GUARDIAN DISTURBS ME DEEPLY. IT IS CALLED “IS BORIS
JOHNSON REALLY GOING TO SACRIFICE ARTS DEGREES FOR THE CONSERVATIVE CAUSE?” I
BELIEVE SOMETHING VERY MUCH LIKE THAT IS HAPPENING ALREADY IN THE US. SOME SCHOOLS
HAVE DECIDED TO MINIMIZE OR ELIMINATE TEACHING MUSIC AND ART IN ORDER TO SAVE
MONEY. WE NEED THOSE THINGS TO AWAKEN OUR INNER BEING TO BEAUTY, LOVE, EMPATHY
FOR OTHERS AND BASIC HONESTY. KNOWING NOT TO STEAL AND LIE BECAUSE THERE ARE PENALTIES
IS NOT THE SAME AS UNDERSTANDING WHY DOING THOSE THINGS IS DEEPLY WRONG. A
PERSON OF CONSCIENCE WILL BEG, BEFORE HE WILL STEAL. THAT, TO ME, IS A POSITION
OF ENLIGHTENMENT.
WHAT IS
ENLIGHTENMENT, WHERE DOES IT COME FROM AND WHY DO WE NEED IT AS A SOCIETY? IS
IT NOTHING MORE THAN A BUZZWORD BASED ON “POLITICS,” OR IS IT AN EXPRESSION OF THAT
OFTEN REPEATED TERM, OUR “VALUES?” THE PROBLEM I HAVE WITH THE WORD VALUES IS
THAT EVERYBODY HAS VALUES, AND EACH PERSON OR GROUP WILL DEFEND HIS OWN. WHITE
SUPREMACY IS THE EMBODIMENT OF A SET OF VALUES. KEEPING WHITE SUPREMACISTS FROM
TAKING OVER REQUIRES “POLITICS.” CLEARLY, IN A DEMOCRATIC NATION, POLITICS IS
ESSENTIAL, AND SO ARE VALUES, BUT THEY HAVE TO BE EXAMINED FREQUENTLY AND
UPDATED. IN OTHER WORDS, WE AS CITIZENS NEED TO THINK ABOUT THINGS THAT ARE OF
A FINER SORT THAN MONEY, PERSONAL STATUS AND POWER.
THAT COMES FROM
A RELATIVE DEGREE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, WHICH IN TURN, IS FED BY SOME KNOWLEDGE AND
APPRECIATION OF THE LIBERAL ARTS FIELDS, FROM PSYCHOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY TO THE
FINE ARTS OF LITERATURE, MUSIC AND VISUAL ART. EDUCATION IS REQUIRED TO PROCESS
INFORMATION; THE ARTS ARE NECESSARY FOR IMPROVING OUR LEVEL OF EMPATHY AND
FAIRNESS, BECAUSE THEY OPERATE ON THE EMOTIONAL AND SYMBOLIC LEVELS OF OUR
SUBCONSCIOUS MIND WHERE OUR ACTIONS FORM. THEY HELP TO MOLD WHO WE ARE, AND
LEAD US TOWARD LOVE RATHER THAN HATRED. I DO BELIEVE THAT THE WORST THING WRONG
WITH AMERICAN SOCIETY TODAY IS THE STRESS WE HAVE PUT ON ATTAINING WEALTH AND
POWER OVER OTHER GOALS, AND I SEE THAT AS BEING CAUSED BY A DENIAL OF OUR NEED
FOR INNER DEVELOPMENT. MONEY SPENT ON A COLLEGE COURSE THAT WILL NOT INCREASE
THE STUDENT’S FUTURE INCOME IS TOO OFTEN VIEWED AS A WASTE.
THE ACTION OF
SPRAYPAINTING RACIST SLURS ON A JEWISH SYNAGOGUE COMES FROM THE SUBCONSCIOUS
LEVEL, AND IT IS MORE THAN A GROUP SYNC REACTION OF DESTRUCTIVENESS. IT IS
INDIVIDUAL. THERE IS NO GROUP WITHOUT INDIVIDUALS WHO DO HAVE A FREE CHOICE IN
WHAT THEY WILL CONDONE OR PARTICIPATE IN. THE NATURE OF THE GROUP REFLECTS THE
INDIVIDUALS WITHIN IT. GROUP AGGRESSION IS THE RESULT OF UNEXAMINED IDEAS OF A
DARKLY NEGATIVE NATURE. ON THE OTHER HAND, WHEN JESUS STOPPED A CROWD OF SELF-RIGHTEOUS
MEN FROM STONING A WOMAN OVER A PERCEIVED INFIDELITY, HE OPERATED FROM HIS
VALUES. IT IS SO IMPORTANT THAT WE MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICES AND HAVE GOOD VALUES.
EMPATHY AND FAIRNESS ARE INDIVIDUAL ATTAINMENTS THAT COME FROM A PLACE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, FROM WHICH WE EACH CONTRIBUTE POSITIVELY TO OUR NATIONAL GROUP CONSCIENCE, THUS PREVENTING OUR SOCIETY FROM BECOMING DEGRADED OVER TIME. WE CANNOT POSSIBLY BE A “GREAT” SOCIETY WITHOUT THE ARTS AND THE INNER GENTLING THAT COMES FROM THEM. WEALTH AND POWER ARE NOT ENOUGH. YES, BY ALL MEANS TEACH JOB SKILLS, MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE, BUT WE MUST NOT FORGET THE INNER PERSON, WHICH MANY OF US CALL THE SOUL.
SINCE
ENLIGHTENMENT IS ONE OF THOSE WORDS THAT WE USE FREQUENTLY, BUT RARELY DEFINE,
I WILL OFFER A DICTIONARY DEFINITION BELOW. I USE IT TO MEAN AN INNER CONDITION
OF GREATER AWARENESS OF HUMANKIND AS A FAMILY RARELY THAN MERELY A SPECIES, IN
WHICH WE TRULY ARE ALL BROTHERS AND SISTERS, AND THROUGH WHICH WE WILL SEE MAN’S
PLACE IN NATURE AS ONE OF RESPECT AND CAREFUL, SUSTAINABLE USE. IT IS A
CONDITION OF BALANCE AND STABILITY, AND IT IS ESSENTIALLY BENIGN. HERE IS WHAT
THE ONLINE OXFORD ADVANCED AMERICAN DICTIONARY SAYS ABOUT IT.
ENLIGHTENMENT
Definition of
enlightenment noun from the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary
1. [uncountable]
knowledge about and understanding of something; the process of understanding
something or making someone understand it
EXAMPLE: The
newspapers provided little enlightenment about the cause of the accident.
2. spiritual
enlightenment
3. the Enlightenment [singular] the period in the 18th century when many writers and scientists began to argue that science and reason were more important than religion and tradition
HERE IS THE NEWS
ARTICLE THAT BROUGHT ON ALL OF THIS THOUGHT. IN MY MORE CYNICAL MOMENTS, I
COULD VIEW THE CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON INDIVIDUAL THOUGHT AND THE EDUCATION REQUIRED
FOR THAT AS BEING ALL TOO POLITICAL. A RELATIVELY UNEDUCATED POPULATION ARE
MUCH EASIER TO MANIPULATE, CONTROL AND ABUSE, SUCH AS BY PAYING SLAVE LEVEL
WAGES FOR MANY HOURS OF HARD WORK. ONE OF THE LESS WELL-KNOWN FACTS ABOUT OUR
HISTORY OF BLACK SLAVERY IS THAT THERE WERE ACTUALLY LAWS, IN SOME STATES AT
ANY RATE, AGAINST TEACHING A BLACK PERSON TO READ AND WRITE. COULD THAT LOGIC
STILL BE IN ACTION TODAY?
AN AUTOCRATIC
CLASS OF EXTRAORDINARILY WEALTHY PEOPLE MIGHT WANT US ALL TO BE UNABLE TO THINK
AND ACT WELL ENOUGH TO HELP OURSELVES. A NEW CLASS OF SERFS WOULD MAXIMIZE
PROFITS, AFTER ALL. I THINK, ACTUALLY, THAT THERE ARE ENOUGH GOOD PEOPLE IN
THIS LAND TO PREVENT THAT, AT LEAST AS LONG AS OUR FORM OF GOVERNMENT REMAINS IN
PLACE. THE ASSAULT ON THE CAPITOL OF JANUARY 6 IS, HOWEVER, A WARNING.
Opinion Students
Is Boris Johnson really going to sacrifice arts degrees for the Conservative cause?
Cutting subsidies and tuition fees are part of broader and more audacious attack on England’s liberal institutions
Gaby Hinsliff
Thu 20 May 2021 12.00 EDT
PHOTOGRAPH -- ‘Enter
the education secretary Gavin Williamson, scoffing, just as students return to
campus, at ‘dead-end courses that leave young people with nothing but debt’.’
Photograph: Hollie Adams/Getty Images
Imagining the
future is never easy. But for teenagers in a pandemic, struggling to get a feel
for university life from “virtual open days” now being conducted strictly via
Zoom, it’s perhaps uniquely tough. This year’s lower sixth, only too aware of a
harsh jobs market out there, are more anxious than ever about getting their
decisions right.
Is university
even worth it? Should they follow their hearts and study what they love, or
buckle down to something boring but more likely to lead to a job? Enter the
education secretary Gavin Williamson, scoffing, just as students return to
campus, at “dead-end courses that leave young people with nothing but debt” –
increasingly taken to mean almost anything but the government’s approved
priorities of science, technology, maths and engineering.
RELATED ARTICLE
-- Job prospects vary widely for graduates in England, data shows
Reading
classics hardly held Boris Johnson back, and nor did his fiancee Carrie
Symonds’s degree in art history and theatre studies stop her enjoying a
successful career in PR. But their baby son’s future choices may be narrower.
Williamson has already suggested halving subsidies for creative subjects such
as drama, art and music, whose graduates may enrich lives but usually earn less
than those heading into banking.
Even this
week’s promised consultation on cutting tuition fees to £7,500 carries a
possible sting in the tail. Lower fees imply lower budgets for all but Stem
departments, which will get extra funding to reflect the greater cost of
running these courses. Some fear that liberal arts and humanities courses could
become increasingly unviable in all but elite universities, unhappily for the
child with a passion for history or flair for languages. There seems little
room in Williamson’s vision for considering what teenagers actually like and
are good at, or what society values more than money, or the fact that if every
18-year-old chose to read maths tomorrow then the earnings premium attached to
that subject might not survive a market suddenly flooded with mathematicians.
The lingering suspicion, meanwhile, is that all this heralds a reduction in
student numbers by the back door.
GUARDIAN ARTICLE
-- Joe Biden’s silence in the face of Israeli violence is a disgrace | Moustafa
Bayoumi
Margaret
Thatcher was so loathed in academia that her alma mater Oxford refused her an
honorary degree, but even she presided over rising student numbers. Her
successor, John Major, opened up higher education by turning the old
polytechnics into universities, and Tony Blair went further, promising degrees
for up to half of all 18-year-olds, equipping them to compete for high-skilled
jobs. Countless kids duly became the first in their families to go to
university, watching our parents sob through our graduation ceremonies at the
sight of sons and daughters miraculously acquiring opportunities they’d never
had. But that quantum leap came at a cost, which the introduction of tuition
fees has only ever partly shifted on to students themselves.
In England,
graduates don’t start repaying student loans until they earn over £27,295 a
year, and on current trends the Department for Education estimates that fewer
than a third will ever earn enough to pay off the lot. Ministers have eyed the
resulting black hole nervously for years but a recent change in government
accounting rules, forcing ministers to include future loan losses on balance
sheets, has concentrated minds.
Reducing fees
and scrapping courses liable to produce lower earners – not just creative
subjects, but perhaps also those that are willing to take kids with very poor
A-level grades – could obviously help limit those losses. That, in turn, frees
up money for further education and more vocational courses, following promises
made to “red wall” voters that their children should be able to train for
decent jobs without leaving their home towns. If so, we could be looking at a
surprisingly radical redistribution of funding from a higher education sector
still dominated by middle-class kids to a long-underfunded FE sector serving
more working-class ones – and one that crucially consolidates a historic shift
in the Conservative base.
The new
dividing line in politics isn’t class, but education and its role in
perpetuating liberal values, with leftwing parties across Europe and the US
increasingly attracting graduates, while people who only ever finished high
school lean to the right. The new squeeze on academia and the arts at
university, together with threats to purge museum and gallery boards of
supposedly “woke” trustees or make the BBC reflect more “red wall”
sensibilities, suggests a broader and more audacious attack on liberal
institutions. A prime minister with a mandate to remake the country for
Conservative ends may finally have a strategy for doing so.
What if Johnson
actually means it? That question is too rarely asked of a man whose talk of
“levelling up’” is still seen as empty rhetoric on the left, and taken barely
more seriously by some traditional Tory voters. They just can’t imagine him
threatening their own children’s chances of trotting off to read art history,
and they may yet be right. Perhaps it’s really all a mirage, encouraging kids
in Hartlepool to wait at home for a glittering future that never quite comes,
while others still reap the timeless rewards of going to university.
But a
Conservative party seemingly willing to sacrifice the union for Brexit, or
throw farmers to the wolves in return for a free trade deal with Australia,
isn’t necessarily the one they know. If he does actually mean it, then we may
be watching a new Boris Johnson emerge; less the hapless incompetent lurching
from one Covid crisis to the next, and more a man whose ruthlessness it was
never wise to underestimate.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist.
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