... is bliss for children tackling history reports the Telegraph.
It just amazes me to read this. I realise that I have been blessed with an exceptionally absorbent and retentive memory - oh you want me on your pub quiz team!- and even I have lapses eg yesterday I could not remember the word that means the sound a train driver causes the train to make as it goes through a station without stopping. The closest I could get was 'hooter'.
But this isn't just about forgetfulness - by substituting 'hooter' I was able to communicate my meaning (ie that one hears such things in the middle of a still, windows-open night).
Ask me cold when the Battle of the Boyne was and I would be struggling to get more precise than the late 17th Century. But I do know for sure that it has absolutely nothing to do with the Lord of the Rings. That's not about knowledge of cold, hard facts - that's about a modest analytical ability to compartmentalise unassociated information. I thought it was a skill that the overwhelming vast majority of people develop at Infant School age.
It's too easy to blame the schools - for heavens' sake, most of them are struggling to instill basic social skills into a the small but significant minority of their pupils. To a certain extent, all through life we absorb information we understand, or about which we care, and filter the rest.
Perhaps I shouldn't care about widespread ignorance. Perhaps it has always been like that. Perhaps we - the chattering classes - just expect more nowadays.
I suppose I just pity those without a thirst to learn. A couple of years back I was horrified to read that half of Primary School teachers didn't know what the Human Genome Project was. I don't pretend to know a lot, but I bet I could explain it reasonably satisfactorily, if superficially, to a Primary School teacher child.
And even though I have absolutely no interest in the Lord of the Rings I know that it is a series of three novels by JRR Tolkein written in about the 1930s, ultimately about the struggle between bad and good, set in a mythical fictional world, with a Ring symbolising power and goodness. If pushed, I could also name some of the characters. I could also tell you that CS Lewis had the view that it reflected Tolkein's support for the Nazis, and that Tolkein was heavily influenced by Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, whichin turn heavily influenced the Nazis. I could tell you why that is important, and I could also tell you why both Rings should also be viewed as Stand Alone works of art without recourse to political analysis. Oh, and Lord of the Rings was made into three films.
Comments