Our late Roger Scruton had this to say— in a book ‘On Hunting’ of all subjects— about the state of our current education system for our youth… and its ramifications:“Students today, their studies in victimology have all but deprived them of words. And their empty slogans and witless sneers make me both ashamed for them and anxious to invite them home for some tutorials. Between ‘bouts of pop music and television, they are handed jargon-ridden drivel by outdated Parisian gurus, impenetrable texts of sociology, the half articulate leavings of the grievance trade.What young people need is *nothing*… so much as wit, allusion, and style. They should be studying advocacy and argument. They should be reading poetry, criticism, and the authors who have said things clearly and well.”Discuss.
Personally I love how he names wit, allusion and style.Allusion requires cultural memory. You cannot recognize an allusion unless you’ve encountered what came before you. Wit requires flexibility: seeing an unexpected relationship between things. Style requires judgment: recognizing that two grammatically correct sentences can nevertheless differ enormously in precision, elegance, force, rhythm, and honesty.All three therefore oppose intellectual passivity.Someone educated in this way doesn’t merely know what Orwell thought. He recognizes an Orwellian euphemism when he encounters one. He doesn’t merely know Shakespeare; Shakespeare has supplied him with metaphors through which he can understand jealousy, ambition, aging, love and political power. He doesn’t merely learn the definition of irony; he can detect it.That is a conception of education as cultivation rather than information transfer.And there is something increasingly countercultural about it.Modern educational systems have powerful incentives toward measurable outputs: standardized competencies, employability, credentials, learning objectives, test performance. Meanwhile, the internet gives young people essentially unlimited information. Generative AI makes the information problem smaller still.Paradoxically, that makes Scruton’s old-fashioned curriculum more relevant, not less.When information is scarce, education needs to transmit information.When information is abundant, education increasingly needs to teach discrimination: Which argument is good? Which source is credible? Which sentence conceals something? Which analogy actually works? What assumption has gone unstated? Why is this beautiful? Why is that persuasive despite being false?Those are precisely the capacities cultivated by close reading, rhetoric, criticism and argument.
Also I adore his statement: “They should be studying advocacy and argument.”Honestly, I think this may be the strongest sentence in the passage.There is an enormous difference between teaching students what arguments exist and teaching them how to argue.A genuinely educated student ought to be able to take a proposition he or she passionately believes and construct the strongest possible case against it. They should know the difference between understanding an argument and endorsing it. They should be able to say:“Here is the strongest objection to my position, and here is why I nevertheless think my position survives it.”If students encounter controversial ideas primarily as things to affirm or condemn, disagreement becomes psychologically threatening. But if disagreement is treated as the ordinary business of intellectual life, encountering a formidable opponent can actually be pleasurable.Scruton himself embodied this temperament at his best. He enjoyed argument because argument was partly aesthetic for him. A clever objection deserved appreciation even when it was aimed at something he cherished.
