“No one has ever suffered from being talked up to” has for a long time been the unofficial mantra of the Peckham mentor scheme I volunteer with, but it now seems to have been adopted as the official mantra of Michael Gove too.
And what an excellent thing that is! More importantly, how many millions of young people will undoubtedly benefit from the academically rigorous approach to education which he outlined in his speech in Cambridge last Thursday night.
It is precisely the much-debated poverty of aspiration which has handicapped so many of our young people and has up till now kept them in their self-prescribed geographical, but even more alarmingly, mental ghettos.
This debilitating poverty of aspiration comes directly from being perennially talked down to at school and not being sufficiently intellectually challenged (for fear of damaging their self-esteem, or because such top notch authors are deemed beyond them). As any educator worth their salt knows, if you consciously raise the bar, more often than not, young people will raise their game too, and will invariably bring their aspiration up to meet the higher level.
Many liberal commentators have cavilled at the “shameless elitism” of which Gove spoke and have caustically denigrated his passionate belief in the intrinsic intellectual merits and civilizing virtues of the Western Canon, be it “Pericles, Virgil or Dryden” or even “the genius of Pythagoras or Wagner, Shakespeare or Newton, Balzac or Pinker.”
Doubtless politically-correct educationalists will take great offence at Gove’s championing of a bunch of “dead white men” and what they perceive to be arcane, difficult books – books which they will claim have no relevance to modern, multicultural Britain or the lives of young people from ethnic minorities in the inner cities. And yet, as any educated person knows (be they black, white or brown), those doing the carping are of course speaking utter nonsense. Of course the poetry of Shakespeare or the novels of Balzac are relevant to young people in this country today, irrespective of their background, skin colour or religion.
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