Keira's Fringe
Keira Knightley, aged 23, has told a magazine that she is “completely uneducated” and that not going to university gave her a chip on her shoulder. “It makes me feel I am going to read absolutely everything so I can prove that I am not stupid.” The poor girl is currently wading through a biography of Albert Speer, a history of the Vietnam War, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Germaine Greer’s hoary old Female Eunuch. With dyslexia, too. What a heroine. Meanwhile, innumerable men and women who do have university degrees – and therefore no chips but a sense of quiet 2:1 superiority – will be on the beach happily sinking themselves in moronic chick-lit and Jeremy Clarkson.
There’s your set-up. I’m not sure it was necessary, but it was funny, so oh well.
By and large, unless you strike an unusually passionate sixth form full of extra-curricular debates and trips, your school education will be a pawky, uninspiring affair. University might set you haring off down exciting new tracks. Or it might not, if you get virtually no small-group discussion and never meet real academics at all, only weary PhD students slaving to earn their rent.
And then there is a creeping utilitarianism. It is hard, looking at the attitude government now takes to education, to connect it with the line from the American philosopher Rosenstock-Hussey: “The goal of education is to form the Citizen; and the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilisation.” That is so breathtakingly, optimistically American that it brings tears to the eyes. Or, from Britain, take the 1928 speech (I found it in the Times Archive) at Morley College for Working Men and Women. Addressing manual workers, Lord Eustace Percy said: “There is always a tendency to devote education to apparently directly utilitarian purposes… but the whole idea and purpose of a liberal education is to liberate the mind.”
Mercifully, outside of the centrally cramped, tickbox-tested formal education system and bite-size doses of Culture Lite, 21st-century Britain shows a real urge towards autodidacticism. Radio 4 and bookshops flourish. Adult education pressure groups fight like tigers to stop government axeing or pricing-out the “useless” subjects.
And almost most encouraging of all, as the Edinburgh Fringe opens, reflect that a remarkable amount of our best comedy assumes and demands a wide frame of cultural reference. In among the pubby dross and repetitive bigotry (yep, Little Britain) there shines the tradition of Python – you’ve got to be aware of the Spanish Inquisition and Jean-Paul Sartre – and of Les Dawson, who used everything from Beethoven to Charles Lamb’s Essays to reckless effect, while not neglecting such staples as mothers-in-law.
We still turn out sharply intelligent and well-read comedy artists, fit to re-found civilisation: Stewart Lee, Christopher Green, Jack Dee all pull big audiences. It seems that neither the horrid froth of celebrity mags and trash telly, nor the dull sterility of government exams, can tell the whole story of the modern British mind. Thank God.
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