Conclusion: Education's Impact
Summary
The values European humanists like to espouse belong just as easily to an African or an Asian who takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European. By that very logic, of course, they do not belong to a European who has not taken the trouble to understand and absorb them. […] They are only ours if we care about them. A culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that would be a good idea.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘There is No Such Thing as Western Civilization’, 2016[T]here is a mind of society, and it is this mind that we address, tutor, doctor, inform, evaluate, criticize, reform. Our role is highly mediated and subtle, insidious even, but as a class of people our impact on the on-going life of society in its day-to-day and even long-term affairs is very diffuse, hence minimal.
Edward Said on literary critics/teachers of literature, 1976This book had several starting points. One was my longstanding interest in literature's relationship to history and politics: its peculiar forms of reference, and also its impact on its readers, its ways of working on the worlds from which, and into which, it emerged. I read Said's Orientalism in the 1980s when I was first thinking about those questions. I agreed with a lot of what he said and admired his sense of political purpose, but started to wonder whether his uses of literature, and of the techniques of literary criticism, truly fitted together with his discussions of politics – including, fundamentally, speculations on texts’ political and ethical effects. (I was in this territory in Chapter 1.) As I continued reading other critics and theorists, that sense of a mismatch proved not to be unusual. It struck me that certain groups of people who seemed to need a reliable account of how literary texts and films worked in the world did not always have one. Postcolonial critics, linked in this way to other critics with an interest in ideology, were one example I explored; censors were another. It also struck me that critics, like censors, can find themselves in a paradoxical position.
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- Information
- Our Civilizing MissionThe Lessons of Colonial Education, pp. 285 - 318Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2019