My family and I just returned from a wonderful trip to Britain. We’re anglophiles and love to steep ourselves in the history of Western Civilization.
On our journey, I decided to read a book that had caught my eye a few years ago, The Abolition of Britain by Peter Hitchens. It chronicles the recent loss of what it means to be British. And, eerily, tells the same kind of story we’re seeing here in the US. About the loss of morals, the new “uncoolness” of patriotism, the anything goes attitudes in schools (to the detriment of our children in so many ways beyond mere scholarship), etc.
In the chapter on the death of the traditional British grammar school, we read about how progressives have fought to rid the country of the foundational structure where true scholarship has been laid for years. Sadly, the progressives are winning, and only occasionally a conservative dissent can be heard. Hitchens writes:
This is the joy of being a progressive. Whenever your views are rejected by experience, common sense, and tradition, it is because you are ahead of the rest of the population, never because you are eccentric or wrong or just plain arrogant, or because they are not convinced by your arguments. They will catch up, and if not, so much the worse for them.
It’s amazing that no matter how low student scores go (and they have dropped precipitiously both in Britain and here in the US), progressives find a way to twist the numbers into a positive. Heaven forbid, the progressives’ plan for a new world order could be wrong!
In a subsequent chapter on the influence television has had on British lives (and ours as well), Hitchens writes:
Dr. Ward describes a typical victim of this early [TV] exposure: ‘He comes into the room and ploughs right past you. If you put a box of toys on the floor, he ploughs through that too, wandering rather aimlessly around and looking at nobody and nothing.’
‘There’s a lack of social awareness, a lack of knowledge of how to function in society. They aren’t picking up on vital clues about how others feel, or how to respond to them.’
Eerily, this describes the exact experience I had at the National Scottish Museum in Edinburgh. I was working my way through the exhibits, reading the plaques and listening to the audio. All of a sudden, a group of French high school students appeared and started wandering around the Museum. They flitted here and there, never stopping long enough to read the material or listen to the audio. It seemed they spent most of their time wandering between me and the exhibit I was standing in front of, never noticing I was there, never apologizing for interrupting my reading. To get them to stop, I had to stand so close to the exhibit that I was nearly nose-to-glass.
I don’t mean to diss just French students here. I wouldn’t be suprised to find most teenagers today act this way. But I’ve got to add, that would have been a rare occurrence when I was a teen. Back then, we were careful to be courteous, especially to adults.
What have we done to our children to turn them into such uncivilized beings?!?!
