Not With A Bang But With A Whimper; The Politics and Culture of Decline - Theodore Dalrymple

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" My father, whose immigrant parents never learned to speak English well, attended a slum school during and just after World War I, with classmates so poor that they went hungry and barefoot. Despite his background, my father found himself inducted into British culture by teachers who did not believe that the ability to understand and appreciate Milton or Shakespeare, or to make a contribution to national life, depended on social class or required roots in the soil going back before the Norman conquests. His teachers had the same faith in the liberating power of high culture, in its universal value and appeal, that many British workers then shared. As the historian Jonathan Rose has beautifully demonstrated in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class, many ordinary English workmen, who led lives of sometimes numbing toil and financial hardship, nevertheless devoted much of their little spare time and tiny wages to improving their lives by strenuous reading of good literature, of whose transcendent value they had no doubt - a faith borne out by the success many of them attained in later years.

My father's teachers were the only people I ever heard him mention with unqualified admiration and gratitude. And he was right to do so: their philosophy was infinitely more generous than that of the multiculturalists who succeeded him. They had no desire to enclose my father in the world that his parents had fled. And they understood that for society to avoid bitter internal conflicts, everyone had to share important elements of culture and historical knowledge that would result in a shared identity. Not by chance did Trevor Phillips regret eighty years later that teachers were instructing children less and less in the great works of English literature, especially Shakespeare - a deprivation wrought not because teachers were complying with any spontaneous demand from below but because they were implementing the theories of elite educationists, especially the multiculturalists.

...English literature is the perfect vehicle for promoting a shared identity. Not to teach Shakespeare or other giants of British culture is to provide no worthwhile tradition with which the increasingly divers population can identify. Without such a tradition, nothing deeper than the ephemeral products of popular culture will be on hand to unite that population, even as profound cultural differences divide it. A shared culture consisting of pop ephemera will likely arouse the justified contempt of immigrants and their children, driving them into ethnic, cultural, or ideological enclaves in search of something more mentally and spiritually nourishing - thereby increasing social tensions, sometimes disastrously." (212-13)