I have been looking for some years for a particular broadcast by Stephen Fry, in the guise of a fictional fuddy-duddy Cambridge Professor which was meant tongue-in-cheek, but resonated with so many parents that it generated his biggest ever mailbag of public praise.(As Fry himself observed: "This one single broadcast for same reason attracted more correspondence than any other: I sent over a hundred copies out to people who wrote in asking to see the thing in print. Some nerve was touched, I suppose." )
Anywho, I believe that the erudite Mr Fry captured the views so perceptively, it merits its own thread. I've wanted to post this for years. tl;dr if you like. Otherwise, absrob, consume and discuss:
"Donald Trefusis is still on his lecture tour of the universities and women's institutes of England. This week has seen him in Newcastle, Exeter, Norwich, Lincoln and tonight, Nottingham. On his way between Norwich and Lincoln he had time to talk to his old pupil, Stephen Fry, whose parallel comedic tour has attracted widespread concern."
Stephen Fry's alter-ego Professor Sir Donald Trefusis wrote:
Hugely so to you all. Firstly I would like to thank the obliging undergraduate of the School of Mauritian Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich who so kindly retrieved my valise last night. I am sorry he had to look into it in order to discover its rightful owner, and I assure him the sum required in used banknotes will be left at the assigned place. I look forward to the safe return of the appliances.
Now, I'm particularly glad I caught you just now because I wanted very much to have a word about this business of education. I have visited so many schools, universities and polytechnics in this last week, listened to the tearful wails of so many pupils, students and teachers, that I feel I should speak out. As one who has spent his entire life, man, boy and raving old dotard, in and out of educational establishments I am the last person to offer any useful advice about them. Better leave that to politicians with no education, sense or commitment. They at least can bring an empty mind to the problem. However I would like to alienate you as much as possible at this time by offering this little canape‚ from the savoury tray of my experience. If you would like to kill me (and you would not be alone in that ambition) forget poison, expunge strangulation from your mind, and entirely fail to consider the possibility of sawing through the brake cables of my Wolseley, there is a much simpler course open to you. Simply creep upon me when I am least expecting it and whisper the phrase 'Parent Power' into my ear. Stand back and admire the effect. Clubbing cardiac arrest.
Parent power: schmarent power, I say. Don't misunderstand me, oh good heavens remove yourselves as far as possible from the position of not understanding me. Democracy and I have no quarrel. But on this head if on no other believe me, parent power and democracy are as closely related as Mike Gatting and the Queen Mother, and unless someone has been keeping a very fruity scandal from me, that is not very closely at all. Parent power is not a sign of democracy, it is a sign of barbarism. We are to regard education as a service industry, like a laundry, parents are the customers, teachers the washers, children the dirty linen. The customer is always right. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And what in the name of boiling hell do parents know about education? How many educated people are there in the world? I could name seventeen or eighteen.
Because of course education is not the issue. 'Heaven preserve us from educated people,' is the cry. Ask Norman Tebbit, for whom a leering naked teenager in a newspaper is no different from a Titian nude, I ask him what education means. Ask the illiterate ghouls of Fleet Street or Wapping Street, or whatever unfortunate thoroughfare they now infest, what education is. A poem with swear words has to be banned from television or they will squeal for weeks. They've dealt with the socialists in the town halls, now they want to turn on those clever people who mock them in their plays and hooks.
This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders. And freedom is no part of the programme of today's legislators. Freedom to buy shares, medical treatment or council houses certainly, freedom to buy anything you please. But freedom to think, to challenge, to change.
Heavens no.
The day a child of mine comes home from school and reveals that he or she has been taught something that I agree with is the day I take that child away from school.
'Teach Victorian values, teach the values of decency and valour and patriotism and religion,' is the cry. Those are the very values that led to this foul century of war, oppression, cruelty, tyranny, slaughter and hypocrisy. It was the permissive society it is so horribly fashionable to denounce that forced America to back out of the Vietnam War, it is this new hideously impermissive society that is threatening to engulf us in another. I choose the word 'engulf' with great care. Look at those Islamic cultures in the Gulf for moral certainty, for laws against sexual openness, for capital punishment and flogging, for a firm belief in God, for patriotism and a strong belief in the family. What a model for us all. Heaven help us, when will we realise that we know nothing, nothing. We are ignorant, savagely, hopelessly ignorant - what we think we know is palpable nonsense. How can we dare to presume to teach our children the very same half-baked, bigoted trash that litters our own imperfect minds? At least give them a chance, a faint, feeble glimmering chance of being better than us. Is that so very much to ask? Apparently it is.
Well, I'm old and smelly and peculiar and I've no doubt everything I said is nonsense. Let's burn all those novels with naughty ideas and naughty words in them, let's teach children that Churchill won the Second World War, that the Empire was a good thing, that simple words for simple physical acts are wicked and that teenage girls pointing their breasts at you out of newspapers are harmless fun. Let's run down the arts departments of universities, let's string criminals up, let's do it all now, for the sooner we all go up in a ball of flame, the better. Oh dear, listening back I can't help feeling that some of you may have got the impression that . . . well, it's only because I care. I do care so very much. And when I'm away from home and see how poor and ignorant a people we are, well it upsets me.
I think I should take one of my slow-release capsules and perhaps snuggle up with an Elmore Leonard and a warming posset. If you have been, I wonder why.
Now, I'm particularly glad I caught you just now because I wanted very much to have a word about this business of education. I have visited so many schools, universities and polytechnics in this last week, listened to the tearful wails of so many pupils, students and teachers, that I feel I should speak out. As one who has spent his entire life, man, boy and raving old dotard, in and out of educational establishments I am the last person to offer any useful advice about them. Better leave that to politicians with no education, sense or commitment. They at least can bring an empty mind to the problem. However I would like to alienate you as much as possible at this time by offering this little canape‚ from the savoury tray of my experience. If you would like to kill me (and you would not be alone in that ambition) forget poison, expunge strangulation from your mind, and entirely fail to consider the possibility of sawing through the brake cables of my Wolseley, there is a much simpler course open to you. Simply creep upon me when I am least expecting it and whisper the phrase 'Parent Power' into my ear. Stand back and admire the effect. Clubbing cardiac arrest.
Parent power: schmarent power, I say. Don't misunderstand me, oh good heavens remove yourselves as far as possible from the position of not understanding me. Democracy and I have no quarrel. But on this head if on no other believe me, parent power and democracy are as closely related as Mike Gatting and the Queen Mother, and unless someone has been keeping a very fruity scandal from me, that is not very closely at all. Parent power is not a sign of democracy, it is a sign of barbarism. We are to regard education as a service industry, like a laundry, parents are the customers, teachers the washers, children the dirty linen. The customer is always right. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And what in the name of boiling hell do parents know about education? How many educated people are there in the world? I could name seventeen or eighteen.
Because of course education is not the issue. 'Heaven preserve us from educated people,' is the cry. Ask Norman Tebbit, for whom a leering naked teenager in a newspaper is no different from a Titian nude, I ask him what education means. Ask the illiterate ghouls of Fleet Street or Wapping Street, or whatever unfortunate thoroughfare they now infest, what education is. A poem with swear words has to be banned from television or they will squeal for weeks. They've dealt with the socialists in the town halls, now they want to turn on those clever people who mock them in their plays and hooks.
This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders. And freedom is no part of the programme of today's legislators. Freedom to buy shares, medical treatment or council houses certainly, freedom to buy anything you please. But freedom to think, to challenge, to change.
Heavens no.
The day a child of mine comes home from school and reveals that he or she has been taught something that I agree with is the day I take that child away from school.
'Teach Victorian values, teach the values of decency and valour and patriotism and religion,' is the cry. Those are the very values that led to this foul century of war, oppression, cruelty, tyranny, slaughter and hypocrisy. It was the permissive society it is so horribly fashionable to denounce that forced America to back out of the Vietnam War, it is this new hideously impermissive society that is threatening to engulf us in another. I choose the word 'engulf' with great care. Look at those Islamic cultures in the Gulf for moral certainty, for laws against sexual openness, for capital punishment and flogging, for a firm belief in God, for patriotism and a strong belief in the family. What a model for us all. Heaven help us, when will we realise that we know nothing, nothing. We are ignorant, savagely, hopelessly ignorant - what we think we know is palpable nonsense. How can we dare to presume to teach our children the very same half-baked, bigoted trash that litters our own imperfect minds? At least give them a chance, a faint, feeble glimmering chance of being better than us. Is that so very much to ask? Apparently it is.
Well, I'm old and smelly and peculiar and I've no doubt everything I said is nonsense. Let's burn all those novels with naughty ideas and naughty words in them, let's teach children that Churchill won the Second World War, that the Empire was a good thing, that simple words for simple physical acts are wicked and that teenage girls pointing their breasts at you out of newspapers are harmless fun. Let's run down the arts departments of universities, let's string criminals up, let's do it all now, for the sooner we all go up in a ball of flame, the better. Oh dear, listening back I can't help feeling that some of you may have got the impression that . . . well, it's only because I care. I do care so very much. And when I'm away from home and see how poor and ignorant a people we are, well it upsets me.
I think I should take one of my slow-release capsules and perhaps snuggle up with an Elmore Leonard and a warming posset. If you have been, I wonder why.