ROGER SCRUTON
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without saying, however, that they are a potential threat to education, as
theology was when the Renaissance humanists first tried to dethrone it.
Group opinions seal off certain areas of thought from free inquiry and es–
tablish barriers and channels to divert the course of reason and force it
underground. This is one reason for the collapse of humane education in
the Islamic world, and the growth of a new kind of uncritical frenzy in
which the knowledge of what to feel and what to do has been miserably
extinguished. Group opinions, though, are also necessary. Our human
world is a shared form of life, and the concepts that we need in order to
participate in that form of life derive in the end from a common fund of
established belief,; and practices. It is a rare circumstance to find the pro–
ject of free inquiry coexisting with the established beliefs that even the
free spirit requires on life's journey. That rare circumstance has been ours,
and it is the ideal of the
polis
3S Plato envisioned it.
Humane education, I suggest, came about because of an inheritance
that permitted and encour3ged questions. It is the fruit of a free but
unskeptical roaming in the human world, unburdened by science or
dogma. The attitudes it promotes are not merely the attitudes of a group,
nor do they have the cohesion of the group as their hidden purpose.
Humane education casts its web of sympathy as widely as is humanly pos–
sible without losing the intellectual discipline required by knowledge, and
it is implicitly univers31 in its 3ppeal. The unique cultural conditions that
permitted this liberty may now be vanishing.
If you study the writings 3nd pronouncements of those who press for
a radical and "empowering" curriculum (and who are not content to en–
trust the future
to
that process of continuous emendation and reform in–
trinsic to the tradition itsel0, you will be struck by the fact that their
premises are precisely foregone conclusions . Propositions that once would
have been hesitantly proposed 3nd arduously argued for, which are barely
intelligible except as the fruits of long controversy, are now adopted as
unquestioned verities . We arc told that traditional society is patriarchal,
that women have been oppressed in Western culture by men, that homo–
sexuality is morally indistinguishable from heterosexuality, that gender is
nothing but a social construct - and a thousand other things that are in
truth the flimsiest of speculations, yet which we are to accept unhesitat–
ingly on pain of social exclusion. You can easily see that these are not ra–
tional beliefs but group opinions, and that those who dare to disagree
with them in public will be forced into the role of enemies rather than
disputants. The radical curriculum is not so much a reformed curriculum
as an anti-curriculum, one designed to seize that fertile territory between
science and dogma, so patiently opened up by nineteenth-century hu–
manists, and once again to close it off from free inquiry.
