Collapse of external authority

Posted on | July 21, 2008 | 3 Comments

I did say that I would follow up with some thoughts on Melanie Phillips’ decade-old book All Must Have Prizes. However, it is such an appalling piece of drivel that I will make this one short comment and then forget about it hereafter.

I don’t know if Phillips ever published an update to the book, but it is interesting to note just how much of her sort of fallacious rhetoric still bubbles up in the media today whenever education is the target for Middle English ire. Like much of Phillips’ output, it is a weird bringing-together of the occasional flash of insight with an almost comic inability to make two and two add up to four. She lurches from wickedly accurate descriptions of the destructive fumblings of politicians, of all hues, when they get their hands on education policy, to delusional daydreams about returning education to a ‘golden age’ that never existed.

Her crowning glory, however, is a chapter entitled ‘The Unravelling of the Culture’, in which she attempts to delineate the distant origins of the ’social dislocation’ that she believes led to the downfall of the English education system. Progressive educationists get it in the neck, of course (AS Neill and Havelock Ellis, specifically), but it is the Enlightenment, she feels, that really started the rot. She is able to write such breathtakingly sweeping lines as:

“It seems reasonable to regard the Enlightenment as the defining moment for the collapse of external authority….”

Defining moment, indeed! Her idiosyncratic take on the nature of progress since the Enlightenment would be genuinely funny if her aim was to amuse – but she really means it.

I should have left it on the shelf……..

Technorati Tags: melanie phillips, enlightenment, all must have prizes, authority

Category: authority, books, education, enlightenment, government, schooling

Comments

3 Responses to “Collapse of external authority”

Alan Coady
July 21st, 2008 @ 12:46 pm

Perhaps better left on the shelf, but sometimes it’s as refreshing to have your views strengthened by those who oppose them, as by those who match them.
David Gilmour
July 21st, 2008 @ 4:11 pm

You’re not alone. Take advice from Zoe Williams, in this memorable piece titled “What’s the point of Melanie Phillips?”:

Cease your struggling against the mire of Melanie, and you will reach a zen-like state of acceptance. Remember, Grasshopper, she was put here to test you.
John Connell
July 21st, 2008 @ 4:26 pm

Nice piece, David – I never thought I’d read the words ‘Melanie Phillips’ and ‘Zen’ in the same article!