4
O
viedo
| C
ampoamor
T
heatre
| 26
th
O
ctober
2001
Once upon a time, and it seems a long time ago, there was a respected figure, The Educated
Person. He —it was usually he, but then increasingly often she—was educated in a way that differed
little from country to country —I am talking of course about Europe— but was different fromwhat
we know now. William Hazlitt, our great essayist, went to a school, in the late eighteenth century,
whose curriculum was four times more comprehensive than that of a comparable school now,
a mix of the bases of language, law, art, religion, mathematics. It was taken for granted that this
already dense and deep education was only one aspect of development, for the pupils were expected
to read, and they did.
This kind of education, the humanist education, is vanishing. Increasingly governments —our
British government among them— encourage citizens to acquire vocational skills, while education
as a development of the whole person is not seen as useful to the modern society.
The older education would have had Greek and Latin literature and history, and the Bible, as a
foundation for everything else. He —or she— read the classics of their own countries, perhaps one
or two from Asia, and the best known writers of other European countries, Goethe, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, the great Russians, Rousseau. An educated person from Argentina would meet a
similar person from Spain, one from St Petersburg meet his counterpart in Norway, a traveller
from France spend time with one from Britain, and they would understand each other, they
shared a culture, could refer to the same books, plays, poems, pictures, in a web of reference and
information that was like a shared history of the best the human mind was thought, said, written.
This has gone.
Doris Lessing
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Literature
2001
Excerpt from the speech given on
the occasion of receiving the Prince
of Asturias Award for Literature
on 26/10/2001.
