Even among revolutionaries, similar views prevailed and, despite a positively post-modern penchant for indoctrination, the Soviet Communist Party accepted the centrality of high culture within the school curriculum. While some Bolsheviks sought to replace ‘bourgeois culture' with a new ‘Prolecult', Lenin himself defended the importance of pupils studying ‘the material that was bequeathed to us by the old society.' And when, thirty years earlier and from a wholly different perspective, Cardinal Newman had spoken of education as giving rise to ‘an acquired illumination... a habit, a personal possession, an inward endowment', and of ‘a Knowledge' or culture which was an end in itself, there was, for once, nothing controversial in his words.

Seen in any kind of historical perspective, the distinctive feature of the present situation is that this consensus no longer exists, and that a profoundly anti-progressive hostility to learning has become widely institutionalised instead. Some schools go to extraordinary lengths to suppress the instinct for knowledge. Frankie -- a pupil in a large inner-city comprehensive -- told me the following story. His school has the sort of discipline and truancy problems familiar enough to many British schools, but in one respect the place is remarkably well organized: every book in the library is colour-coded according to the age of the children who are permitted to read it, and nobody is allowed to take out any book of the ‘wrong' colour. So it happened that the school authorities, grappling with the daunting problems of managing a big inner-city comprehensive, took the time and trouble to track down and punish Frankie for taking out of the library a book on how the mind works, which they considered him too young to read.