Educating for the New Age

Yes, Dr Douce is quite right, and in schools OfTru are now teaching books which relate to children’s life experience, not the so-called ‘classics’ that the old middle-class elites used to force upon them. So I’m afraid the Eliot you did at school would look a bit old-fashioned now, Clary. Many of those old books were simply full of snobbery and about very privileged people with concerns very different from ordinary children. Some of them were even from a different age altogether! Now, children are reading to build up a sense of identity and to promote equal opportunities. OfTru are proactively encouraging works of art that represent excluded groups and cultures. OfTru is committed to public art and to anti-elitism, but there’s a huge struggle with the conservatism and vested interests of academics and those who are taken in by their jargon. So it’s no bad thing, too, that there’s a decline in subjects like philosophy and history in the academic world—we should be educating people for real life, not idle dreams.