In the past week I've watched An Education, The King's Speech, and read Never Let Me Go. Anglophilia, or education obsession? It's hard to separate the two. In fact, in reading Never Let Me Go, I came to realize how deeply I believe in the Myth of the English Boarding School, with no head for the fact of it. I absolutely believe that every English person is bundled from babyhood straight into a towering hall of learning, all tea, kneesocks, Latin, and tweed. I believe they are veritable cradles where the infants quote shakespeare (the proper parts, not the bawdy stuff), and that at any graduation a wandering citizen might find there twenty or thirty graduates (for no class would ever be larger), all wide eyed and ready to embrace the world. I've been to England; I know well enough that it's grown to the twenty-first century with the rest of us, but forget that. My way is so much better.
Both of these movies and this novel are about education, and I've thought a lot about the subject lately, in part because I've returned to work, and in part because there seems to be no stopping The Internet and Media from fear-mongering the generally dismal state of the American educational system. Where you have education panic, laments about The Uselessness of the Humanities never follows far behind. Normally I try not to say much when it comes up, largely because someone always implicitly points out that my own station in life is proof of the failure of my field, and no one likes much to be proof of failure, especially when they're generally quite satisfied. But these three texts all brought up a different sort of question: why educate us at all, when so much of adulthood is just terminal misery? This is less explicitly the topic of The King's Speech, but I tell you: it's there.
It's a good question. Why education? Like the humanities, there's no defending it without either insulting it or sounding like its pitiful orphaned offspring. So, I think I'll just say this: though the movie moralizes against it quite a bit, I'd like to side with Jenny in An Education, the Jenny who behaves badly and sleeps with older criminals. "Why not?" I think we'd both say. We're all to die soon anyway, and we must spend our time doing something. Why not jazz, why not smoking, and why not the arts? I'd like to take her philosophy farther, and give similar support to all the things she hates: studying, being bored, feeling generally miserable. Maybe it's all the Kierkegaard I've been reading this last week but I say "why not?" to all of it: drinking and working, dancing and shuffling about miserably, reading, eating, quitting, over working, staring uselessly at art and thinking "yes. that's exactly it," donating all our organs and be done with it. Let's pit extreme highs against extreme lows and in the end we can call it a zero sum game.
I might start blogging again regularly, but I won't make any promises. I might also watch a few good movies now and then, mixed in with all the trash for a little color. I'm still thinking about a post about tramp movies and hipsters, as well as a post about what happened, exactly, in the last two seasons of The X Files. So, if anyone still actually reads this blog (unlikely), you might want to sign off before that second post. If you don't want to sign off, maybe you'll post something you've been thinking, but not writing, about. It's fun, posting, though I'm not sure why.
As I reread this, I can see that all this British media has made me sound way too British, but it will be better once Thad comes home and I have someone normal to talk to.
