More on ‘most of them are unteachable’: More children need to be left behind! Those Mr. Jackson describes as having “little conception of ordinary decorum” and “no interest in academic subjects” do not belong in the classroom. Another part of the problem as other LRC readers know is the state schools are less about real learning than indoctrination/social engineering.
I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.
Anti-Catholic prejudice is one of the main themes of today’s increasingly conformist imagination. An old friend and I came to the conclusion that the country’s élite are creepily, consciously evil because you had a Catholic country turned Protestant by force (it took most of the 1500s) with lots of reminders of that (names of churches, schools, towns etc., echoes in the classical music, even the crosses in the flag); this élite know jolly well what it all means (even with today’s secularised, dumbed-down schooling?) and say ‘I will not serve’. Calvinism eventually turned into granola but it’s all the same really. Counterpoint:don’t forget the WASP virtues of manners and duty. Civilised and tough people (armed with, along with guns, a classical education; P.J. O’Rourke: ‘People here acting as though they were in the Iliad; have figured out all the angles; send pecunia’) who created an empire (right or wrong, nothing to sneeze at — BTW the Irish enthusiastically took part) that not incidentally included inventing America.
On that note, not from Joshua but Dr Tighe, crumbling empire and moral absolutes. Or if you sit through enough of the pleasantries you can hear a few words from the Pope hit their targets. Dr T, who like me lived there, has nailed its established Protestantism with the phrase deep freezer of latitudinarian moralism to which I add in a shell of credal orthodoxy like the walls of the old Gothic church that still has a mediæval saint’s name.
Some jottings about the news
