31 March

DH Lawrence foretold a time when compulsory and prolonged schooling would make the majority of the population despise all learning. I’ve posted a lot about how that shift led to the emergence of ‘kidult’ culture i.e. the replacement of adult life with a never-ending adolescence. Lawrence saw that this in turn would make people lose all respect for learning itself. Because those not born to be scholars (most people) are now forced to spend their entire childhood years trying to be one, and inevitably failing at it, they come to have a deep hatred of learning and those who are good at it. Which in turn means that societies no longer use scholarship and learning to guide what they should be doing. Prior to the compulsory and prolonged schooling experiment, people deferred to scholarship. It’s a job, a vocation, they knew some were good at it, and most weren’t. Just like any other job, some have a natural aptitude for it. And that’s how we ended up living in a world where there’s a hatred for actual knowledge. Where scholars are called ‘elites’ and are openly abused and attacked. Where all of that has been replaced by the lethal alternative - opinion. Universities replaced by social media, the great aggregator of opinion. Our greatest prejudice is against learning. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying some people are smarter than others, and that some jobs and institutions (like unis) know things most people don’t know. We do that with sport, we do it with cooking, we do it with everything. But not knowledge and learning. Which means as societies, we are now dumb. Opinion is not a replacement for knowledge. It’s fake knowledge used to create social identity. Dumb societies don’t survive, for the obvious reason that they can’t access knowledge about the best things to do because they make all knowledge DIY. Societies are literally now led by the bottom two-thirds of every class at school, and their anger at that ranking. I was a teacher. As was Lawrence. Teachers are not democrats in the way we think of democracy. It’s a teacher’s job to ruthlessly expose and correct bad thinking. To have a hierarchy of what is true and what’s bullshit, and to brutally weed out the bullshit. To be ‘elitist’, just as a good plumber won’t tolerate crap plumbing. Teachers are now despised. That’s kidult culture.