'A Certain Minimum of General Knowledge'

The Oxford-based English journal Critical Survey in 1969 published a special issue titled “Fight for Education: A Black Paper.” Among the contributors was Robert Conquest who a year earlier had published his best-known and most influential book, The Great Terror, a pioneering study of Stalin’s Great Purge in which millions of innocent Soviet citizens (including Osip Mandelstam) were killed between 1936 and 1938.

Conquest’s essay is titled “Undotheboys Hall” and in his first paragraph he states his theme: “[T]here are at present two major faults in education: first in what students are not taught, and second, in what they are taught.” His thesis touches me personally because in 1969 I was a senior in a public high-school in the U.S. My creative writing teacher that year was Suzanne Murphy. (I wrote about her here.) We stayed in touch after I graduated. Once, during a telephone conversation about twenty years ago, she told me that her students had conspicuously changed starting around 1970. They didn’t know things. Their ignorance and indifference to learning had become increasingly obvious. In class, she had casually mentioned Winston Churchill and Duke Ellington, and not a single kid had recognized their names. Could American kids really be that ignorant? And whose fault was it? Conquest states the obvious:

“An educated man must have a certain minimum of general knowledge. Even if he knows very little about science and cannot add or subtract, he must have heard of Mendel and Kepler. Even if he is tone deaf he must know something about Debussy and Verdi; even if he is a pure sociologist he must be aware of Circe and the Minotaur of Kent and Montaigne, of Titus Oates and Tiberius Gracchus. It will be seen that I am not being very demanding. But I have come across cases in which these names, or their equivalents, have been unknown to undergraduates, or, on occasions, graduates of the present-day universities. It is not a question of useless or obsolete knowledge learnt by rote but of, at lowest, reference points without which it is impossible to navigate the seas of our culture. It is the sort of information which in any ordinary society the educated have absorbed without special effort.”

This shared fund of knowledge is today dismissed as “trivia.” After all, it has little or no utilitarian value. It won’t land you a job and isn’t likely to attract a member of the opposite sex. For Michael Oakeshott, conversation, an ingredient of which is such commonly shared knowledge, “is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.” Some of us live for such adventure.

I kept reminding myself as I was reading Conquest’s essay that it was published fifty-six years ago and the process he describes has only accelerated. Multiple generations have internalized ignorance and the rejection of our cultural inheritance, and accepted it as the natural state. In the same issue of Critical Survey, Conquest’s friend Kingsley Amis contributes “Pernicious Participation,” in which he writes of his own student days at St. John’s College, Oxford: 

“My own self-tailored final examination would have consisted of a Shakespeare paper, one or two papers on those writers between about 1500 and 1900 who had most interested me at school, and the remainder on literature since 1900. No Old English, Middle English, history of the language, or any of that. Being a student, I had no way of knowing then what a close study of Spenser, Milton and Wordsworth, pre-eminently but not exclusively, would reveal to me. Nor had I at the outset -- again, there was no way whereby I could have had -- any but a vague and incomplete idea of what it meant to study an academic subject at the undergraduate level. Without that knowledge which I should never have acquired if I had not been under pressure to do so, I should have been much the poorer for the rest of my life.”