Decline and fall? We're losing our intellectual curiosity
Each successive generation seems to know less and less "stuff", and doesn't seem to care about it
If you aren’t familiar with the snarlingly bilious Welsh academic and biographer Roger Lewis, I advise you to look him up. Apart from being a fellow graduate of the University of St Andrews, he has charted the lives of Peter Sellers, Charles Hawtrey, Anthony Burgess and Laurence Olivier—a diverse group of subjects in itself—and I laughed until I actually ached when I read his Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life As It Is Lived. It is inspired by the ghastly round-robin letters ghastly people send at Christmas, and if you like invective-fuelled hatred on an industrial scale, you will love this book. Lewis writes from his home in the “Herefordshire Balkans”, and feel rage and contempt for… well, almost anything.
(A few samples: of the critic Alexander Chancellor he writes “I was thrilled when the old poof died, I hope crushed by his bouffant hair-do”. Philip Hensher, the novelist and former House of Commons clerk is “everywhere. Like shit in a field.” On success and failure, he muses “You think you’re going to be Cary Grant. You’d settle for being Jeremy Irons… You end up as Patrick Mower.” The historian Andrew Roberts, recently ennobled as Lord Roberts of Belgravia, has the “grimace of a baboon with diarrhoea trying to hold it in”. And commenting on an obituary of Harold Pinter, he notes “He couldn’t be happy unless at some point during the day he’d snarled fuck or cunt at someone he’d decided was beneath him.” It is not a nice book, but it is a very funny book.)
Anyhoo… I was reading an article by Lewis in The Oldie (OK, I clicked a link on Twitter to the website of The Oldie, which seems counter-intuitive) in which he railed, as if he could do anything else, at the decision to drop poetry from its compulsory place on the GCSE English syllabus. From this, raging, Lewis unfurls a thesis that this is an order of philistinism “which amounts to Nazi book-burning” which he attributes to the poor quality of current teachers.
I have met teachers who have never heard of Orson Welles or Muriel Spark. They don’t read for pleasure, or watch black-and-white movies, and they never stray outside the syllabus. The word I’d use is thick. Anyone with talent quickly resigns in despair.
The combination of Lewis and The Oldie inevitably gives the piece a distinct whiff of performative grumpiness, a generic ejaculation of rage at falling standards, the mounting idiocy of the modern world and an overwhelming (and very far from unspoken) sense that things are not what they used to be. Nevertheless, it did strike something of a chord in my sometimes-despairing soul, a theme to which I have certainly warmed in the past, and I wondered if there might be truth in the idea that we are, as a society, becoming less learned, less generally aware of the world and its heritage, and fundamentally less intellectually curious.
I have teased out the idea before, to my friends’ endless patience, that we live in a paradoxical time. We have literally never had more and easier access to knowledge. Most of us now carry a mobile device which allows us to find out almost any fact you could seek, to read any work of literature every written, to learn about any idea that has ever been thought. My stepfather, an English teacher by training but a man of boundless interests and quirky hobbyhorses, habitually refers to Google as his “second memory”. I know what he means. I do remember, for example, that the capital of Morocco is Rabat; that some of the more dubious, ahem, passages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover are probably references to anal sex which D.H. Lawrence thought, quite rightly, would go over the heads of more prim members of its potential readership; and that the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 left both the Serbian and Ottoman armies dreadfully hollowed out but was a strategic victory for the Muslim invaders, who could reinforce the region with fresh troops. But it is good to have the ability to check.
One doesn’t just have the ability to check items like that. The internet being constructed the way it is, you may go from one nugget of information to another, making connections of which you had not previously been aware, discovering information you never even knew existed, let alone that you didn’t know. It is a journey, an agglomeration of learning, a trail of data. It is an education. And all of this open to anyone with a SIM card and a few minutes to spare.
Here is the paradox. This huge, generous, almost promiscuous availability of information had coincided—if it is a coincidence—with an almost-wilful indifference to anything outside one’s own existing mental landscape. That which one does not already know, one often seems not to care about. It is not just ignorance, though that is corrosive enough. It is the closing of the mind to new ideas because one simply cannot conceive of why they would be interesting.
Now, I do not set myself up as representative of anything or anyone but myself. I don’t generalise from the specific—well, I try not to—and I don’t expect others to act and think as I do (imagine what a nightmarish world that would be). On the other hand how I think is the only way I can know with certainty, and I can’t understand this in the slightest. I have always been intensely curious about the world, about the past, about culture and art and literature and invention and nature. If something is engaging and skilfully presented, I can find myself eagerly lapping up knowledge about the most improbable topics: I read and thrilled to The Club: How the Premier League Became the Richest, Most Disruptive Business in Sport, an institutional and financial history of the English Premier League by Wall Street Journal editor Jonathan Clegg and his sports desk colleague Joshua Robinson. Yet I normally have no interest in football, sometimes to a violent degree. Presented with a carefully plotted narrative, however, I was gripped.
Is it just middle-aged dyspepsia which makes me dismiss generations younger than me as ignorant and apathetic? I don’t think so. (Not just that, anyway.) A poll of under-20s in 2008 found that nearly half of those surveyed thought Richard I, our legendary, Francophone, possibly bisexual crusading Coeur de Lion, was a fictional character; 20 per cent of them held the same opinion of Sir Winston Churchill. By contrast, two-thirds of them believed that King Arthur and his knightly companions were real historical figures, half regarded Robin Hood as part of our history, and, inexplicably, 47 per cent of the young whippersnappers though the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby had really existed.
This was not a one-off. A similar poll a few years later found that 20 per cent of all adults surveyed attributed real historical status to Sherlock Holmes and, bafflingly, Edmund Blackadder (apparently in all his epoch-spanning incarnations). Even when we do “know” things, we are credulous and easily influenced: think of the recent controversy of historical inaccuracies in Peter Morgan’s The Crown and a genuine, earnest debate about whether it should be preceded by warnings that it was a work of dramatic fiction, albeit based on real events. But we are credulous because we are ignorant: if you know nothing, you will readily accept the first thing that is presented to you.
The journalist and academic Sir Noel Malcolm put it rather well when he identified this as a cancerous form of childhood ignorance.
People who know no history are reduced to living in a perpetual present; this flattens their understanding of so many things, rather as if the three dimensions of ordinary experience had been squeezed down to two. The effect is, in the end, infantilising.
It is not just history which is for too many people shrouded in a mist which some do not even realise exists. Think of literature and especially its teaching in schools, which is where Lewis’s howl in The Oldie began. His casus belli was the removal of compulsory poetry, but we also see again and again works from the canon being discarded in favour of more “relevant” material, books and plays which will be more immediately appealing to young minds.
There is an important point here which we should not allow to be conflated with other concerns. Of course there are valid criticisms that the western canon which has traditionally been the backbone of the curriculum is, in the description of the cliché, “pale, male and stale”. It is an obvious benefit for pupils to read widely, and to absorb literature which previously would not even have been considered because its authors were the ‘wrong’ ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion or other category. To take an example, it is a significant step forward that we in the UK are now much more comfortable and familiar with the great flowering of English-language literature in West Africa which exploded into life really with Chinua Achebe. His Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer At Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), the so-called African Trilogy, rejected a colonial and post-colonial lens on his homeland and instead framed the story of Nigeria with traditional Igbo themes, the influence of Western missionary Christianity and the friction between European and African cultures. It is now a popular and vibrant tradition represented by writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who last year was named by the BBC as one of their Women of 2021.
The current GCSE curriculum is relatively unprescriptive. It stipulates one Shakespeare play, one novel of the 19th century, a selection of poetry since 1789 (essentially the beginning of Romanticism) and a fiction or drama from post-1919 Britain. You might think that leaves a great deal of freedom for teachers to introduce a diverse range of authors: Shakespeare is sui generis (which is rather the point of Shakespeare) but one could choose a novel by Dame Muriel Spark (female, of Jewish descent, baptised Anglican but Catholic convert), something by Joseph Conrad (not a native Anglophone, Polish/Ukrainian/Russian by birth, dealt with themes of race and colonialism) and a collection of poetry by Vikram Seth (Calcutta-born Hindu, educated in India, the UK and the US, bisexual, politically active).
Alas not. Each examination board (there are six) provides lists for each category, and each features between six and eight choices. So in fact the restrictions are pretty tight. You can’t set Muriel Spark. Or Joseph Conrad. Or Vikram Seth. You can choose well-known television celebrity Meera Syal’s Anita and Me, and Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, twice filmed (more recently with Daniel Radcliffe), twice produced for radio and the adaptation of which is the second-longest running play in the West End. I’m just saying. One exam board, in its list of “Different culture fiction”, features John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou and the aforementioned Syal. That’s not different culture. That’s America. And three of those at least are very mainstream.
These lists and groups also show how easily an English class could avoid most of what we consider the classics of English literature. The chronological stipulations help, as does the prescription of a Shakespeare play (though one might argue that a single work by the Bard of Stratford barely scratches the surface of his contribution to world literature). Furthermore, while doing its best to straddle a lengthy period, it can present texts totally unconnected to each other and ripped out of their context, which diminishes even the greatest works of literature. How much better do we appreciate Spark if we know Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor and James Kennaway?
It is perhaps this intellectual and cultural isolation, this lack of context, which bites most deeply. We seem now to narrow the focus of pupils to as few works as possible and “teach the exam”, so they might produce a brilliant script on the text itself but have no concept of what it means and stands for, how it was shaped, and where it sits in our cultural library. This leads to the impoverishment that Lewis was speaking of, in which younger generations seem to have very little general knowledge.
A tiny example, silly perhaps but I think perhaps illustrative. Think, if you will, and can, of television programmes like The X Factor. How often do the contestants on these shows perform covers of songs which are 30, 40, 50 years old? There is an obvious commercial driver there: a familiar song has wider appeal and will sell more units, making Simon Cowell (who, by the by, I actually rather like) even richer than he already is. But how often, too, do you find people who have no idea that these songs are covers? They assume everything put before them is new and fresh and pristine, and are, if not dismayed or surprised, then discombobulated by the fact that the song is already well-known? A case in point: how many parents of Gen Z teenagers have been asked, since the success of Netflix’s Stranger Things, if they’ve heard of a singer called Kate Bush? Cue parental eye-rolling and a long and emotional story about buying the LP of Hounds of Love.
I think this is all connected in different ways. The increasingly dominant mindset seems to be that anything before one’s personal experience is alien, there is no burning desire to find out about it, and there is—and I think this is what pains me most—a complete lack of embarrassment about not knowing something and of any curiosity after discovering a fact or artwork’s backstory. So when the stereotypical Gen Z finds out that Kate Bush was first successful, and grandly so, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the reaction is not to ask who she was, what else she performed, who influenced her or what she’s doing now, but rather a blank, or even slightly sullen “Huh”.
The rubber of this theory hits the road of reality in examinations. There are two modern notions about exams, from opposite ends of the debate, but we need to tackle both: one is that exams are getting easier, and the other is that exams are not as useful a teaching and learning tool as we once thought. Let’s have a look at both of these.
Are exams getting easier? An obvious fact in support of this idea is the way that grades get better overall with almost every passing year. That must, surely, argue the sceptics, indicate grade inflation and falling standards? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. There is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect which indicates that IQ scores have steadily and significantly risen over the 20th century, so there may be an extent to which pupils are, simply, getting cleverer (or at least better at tackling IQ tests, which are fraught with limitations and qualifications). So that could play a part in rising grades.
We are also sometimes told that pupils today struggle badly when presented with exams from the 1960s or 1970s. That could indicate that those older tests were more difficult and pupils are no longer taught to the same standard; but it could also indicate that the methods of teaching and the skills that exams require have changed over the past half-century, meaning that pupils now are merely unfamiliar with older exams rather than unequal to them. But there is also a strong body of anecdotal evidence, which should not be ignored but must be taken with its own cautions, to suggest that, yes, exams were more demanding in preceding decades, and we place less strain and exact less rigorous scrutiny on pupils today. The research is sketchy and does not, alas, admit of a decisive conclusion.
What about the notion that exams in themselves are becoming obsolete and are no longer regarded as a good way of testing and benchmarking knowledge? Even when I was at school, 30 years ago, there was a move towards a greater contribution of coursework, partly because, it was felt, some pupils were not suited to the stress of examination conditions and would not be able to produce their best performances. The priggish, swotty 14-year-old me, who happened to do quite well under pressure (I once turned in my best internal school exam performance while sporting a raging fever of between 38 and 39°C), was dismissive of this, but on mature reflection I accept there is some strength in the argument, though one must be realistic about how fully any mechanism can test the depth and breadth of pupils’ learning.
Nevertheless, there is a fragile educational consensus that traditional exams still have a place, particularly in those subjects, like languages, which benefit from an extent of memorisation. One must possess a factual framework before one can hang more sophisticated concepts on it. Exams and tests are also good ways of measuring and marking progress. However, it is true that exams are less good at testing and developing skills like critical thinking, analysis and evaluation. These traits are not in themselves helped by impressive recollection, and open-book exams and other methods are no bad thing.
(A good summation of the debate over traditional examinations can be found in this article from The Times Higher Education Supplement.)
My own view, as we sit exhausted and bemused by all the various types of evidence, is that we are losing something. It is perhaps less the learning itself, though I think perhaps less of that goes on, and more the mindset which leads young people, and, indeed, older people, to learn, read, watch, see, acquire knowledge, assemble it and make it work together, and generally to think about things. Perhaps “knowledge” is more atomised now, our cultural horizons wider and therefore less amenable to the notion of a common cultural hinterland, but I do think, quite strongly, we have changed in our attitudes. We now regard too many art forms, like opera or experimental art or cinema from outwith the Hollywood mainstream, as elitist, or snobbish, or distant and difficult to relate to.
That is genuine poverty of ambition. If we regard anything as “too hard” or “impenetrable” or “irrelevant”, we do ourselves a disservice and sidle up to culture in a lazy way. We effectively demand that we cannot appreciate any art which is not immediately applicable and relevant to us—and when that combines with a disinclination to learn new things, it creates tight limitations to our cultural words. How many people do you encounter or read about who won’t watch black-and-white films? Who say that they can’t understand Shakespeare? Who won’t endure anything with subtitles? That refusal to countenance anything which is demanding or not immediately accessible and familiar simply draws lines in the sand, or else scrawls on huge swathes of learning the forbidding Hic sunt dracones (Here be dragons: the decline of the classics is another issue which pains me but requires separate and special treatment, but, in general, learn Latin, pueri et puellae).
I fear that it boils down, or leads up, to this. We have abandoned the concept of telling young people that they can be better. We don’t want to chastise. We certainly don’t want to suggest that they are inadequate or lacking in learning. Instead, we bowdlerise any kind of obstacle or challenge: children do not “struggle” with reading, much less are they “delayed” or “behind”. Every child learns at his or her own pace. Some will argue that competitive exams, ranking performance, putting pupils in any kind of order, is damaging, demoralising, destructive. Can we not even measure themselves against their own potential, the better angels of their nature? Can we not say, look, here is progress, learning, erudition? You can achieve it, but it will take hard work.
That, surely, is the great leveller of education. We can all be better, more learned, more aware, more skilled, and the vast opening of access to information has created a fairer and more democratic atmosphere than we have ever had. The sort of books available—so many of them out of copyright and therefore free—on a smartphone is dazzling in its breadth and variety. Want to read Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae? Yours for literally no money. You want to find out about the colonial history of South Africa and how it got first to its dismal apartheid condition and then to today’s imperfect but infinitely freer Rainbow Nation? Half a dozen websites will give you more information than you will be able to absorb.
This is the fundamental issue. Information is out there. Ways to learn are out there. Experiences and commentaries and stories and narratives are out there. The only thing that is essential, and which cannot be provided, is a desire to know. If we can help people, young and old, nurture that, we can do anything.
[Coda: Roger Lewis also responsible for the greatest footnote I have ever read. In full thus: “Norman Douglas (1868 - 1952), after a Foreign Office career, settled in Capri, where he wrote travel books about Italy and bummed the shepherd boys. According to Anthony Burgess, when Douglas came across a postman who'd knocked himself out cycling into a tree, Douglas bummed him where he lay. Anthony Burgess would have stolen the bike. Jonathan King would have bummed the bike and the postman.”]
I got the Roger Lewis book you recommended - I've read it in 2 days and laughed out loud through most of it - brilliant. Recommending it to everyone I know, thanks.
Loved this. I am still interested in learning new things and I'm 60 this year. I think my daughter's generation are much more about 'living in the now'. They're all missing out.