Dan Ryan, David Burchell, and a ripper of a double bunger yearning for the golden days of the past ...

(Above: Woodstock. The beginning of modern homelessness?)

There was nothing like a double bunger in the good old days when fireworks were legal, and pussy foot liberal do gooders hadn't managed to intervene and make litigious attempts to stop children blowing off a finger, or burning or blinding themselves.

Wretched liberals, always interfering with human liberty and freedom. When a double bunger could take out a letter box in fine style, or scare the dog under the bed or send the cat into a curling feral semi-psychotic condition.

Ah the good old days, now ruined by all of us living in the current bad new days.

But we still have double bungers, at least if you consider David Burchell's yearning for the good old days of Victorian England in Dickensian lessons in homelessness, and Dan Ryan yearning for the good old days of Latin and ancient Greek in the education system in Culturally adrift without classical moorings.

Ryan's plea is charming and heartfelt. While his grandfather and his mother both did Latin, he missed out:

By the time I went to school there was apparently no need to teach the classics any more. They were dead languages and, besides, there was not enough time in the school day to fit them in between classes in home economics, woodwork, typing and the like. How sure are we that the effective elimination of the classics from our education system has been without consequence?

Oh dear, well I remember the cry "get out your Bembrick" but I'm afraid it didn't do much for the thugby league player at the back of the class who later went on to play for South Sydney. Come to think of it, a Latin education probably wouldn't do much for Russell Crowe or South Sydney at the moment either.

Ryan is disturbed that these days rather than growing up with a decent classical education, the young grow up with Avatar. Because the future has become the present, and the arguments of the philistines have won over the heritage of Oxford and Cambridge:

The rationale was not always stated explicitly; it was simply understood. A classical education was needed first of all to impart content -- to maintain basic Western cultural literacy. Your understanding of the West would be necessarily incomplete and superficial without a good acquaintance of the Aeneid, the works of Ovid and Aeschylus, the speeches of Pericles and Cicero, and the Homeric epics. The second reason, as classicist Tracy Lee Simmons emphasises in his excellent book Climbing Parnassus, was that learning these hard ancient languages had a point in itself -- it required students to focus on the precise meaning of words, making them less patient with sloppy language and thinking. For Westerners, only the languages of Latin and Greek can perform this role.

Well who am I to decry the virtues of Greek and Latin - that way you might be able to work through the Joseph Campbell mess of mythology in Avatar - but of course you can't have virtue without vice, and the study of Asian languages is clearly a vice:

The high-minded hope was that the combination of the content and the process would make us better able to govern ourselves, both individually and as a society. To know a liberty fit for men, not animals. What does it say that we are now fixated about becoming Asia-literate, but that there is no concern about the obvious decline in Western cultural literacy levels?

I am not saying that one should not learn Asian languages or have a deep interest in the cultures of Asia. I speak and read Mandarin and have been learning since university days. I ended up marrying a Brit who speaks Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu. Whether spending $11 billion on compulsory mass Asian language education training from year 3 onwards would result in a net economic gain or otherwise make sense is something others can duke out. From what I've seen so far of the plans, colour me highly sceptical.

What a pity in this argument that Ryan chooses as his ground the notion that education should be measured as a kind of net economic gain. From what I read of his plans to return us to Greek and Latin, colour me highly sceptical about the likely net economic gains of that move. I don't want a geek to speak Latin while he's fixing my computer, I just want him to fix my computer. Let him study Latin in his own time.

Because in the end Ryan's offering yet another deep seated yowl about the way the world has gone to mud:

What I do strongly believe is that one's understanding of the East will, in the long run, be hindered unless you have a proper understanding of the West. Lawrence of Arabia would have thought the lack of Latin and Greek a terrible obstacle to the understanding of Arabic. William Jones, the famed Sanskrit scholar, would have thought likewise with regard to understanding the languages and cultures of the subcontinent. The same holds true for the languages of East Asia. Australia's pre-eminent Sinologist, Pierre Ryckmans, was educated in Europe. I bet my bottom dollar he was taught Latin during his formative years. It shows in his writing style and liberal mind.

Without a decent acquaintance with the Western classical heritage we are dooming ourselves to a glib relativism born of ignorance, to being forever trapped in the parochialism of the present, to being a nation adrift without a cultural anchor.

Oh yes, glib relativism, and ignorance, which of course might be an argument that could be mounted against the failure to put the study of history at the centre of everything - not that I see history helping out that much when it comes to a net economic benefit either. Perhaps what we need is the deep seated pessimism and gloom of the cynics of old:

What is needed is not a new state education plan. The renewal is unlikely to come via our sclerotic state-directed command-and-control education system that governs both fee-paying and non-fee-paying schools. Carthago delenda est.

Yep, I can't think of a better reason to study Latin than to learn that Carthage and similar wretches should be wiped from the earth. Wow. Scorched earth for education, and terra nullius for the world. Carthago delenda est? Cato the elder as a role model? Barbaric destruction, imperial rtbaggery, slavery, destruction and servitude? The persistent opposition to new ideas, the horror of Greek physicians, the despair at Greek manners and philosophers? And so on. Never mind, Ryan sounds like he'd make a worthy Cato:

If there is a renewal, I suspect it will be through less mainstream institutions like Sydney's Campion College, through teachers with a deep love of Western culture, and through some of the classically educating home schooling families I have been honoured to know.

Campion College? You mean the only liberal arts college offering higher education in the Catholic tradition. Like study Latin and you can sing along to the Catholic mass? Home schooling? Like the fundie Christians?

Oh dear, suddenly I feel quite out of touch with Dan Ryan.

It will come when we realise that it has been a terrible dereliction of duty not to pass on "the best that has been thought and said" to the next generation and we are not going to let it continue. Now that truly would be an education revolution.

Assuming of course you think that the Catholic tradition represents the best that has been thought and said, as opposed to the tradition of the decent Greeks and Romans who had a handy set of gods and an excellent mythos until the Christians came along and ruined it all.

Ah well, time for a little bout of the excellently florid David Burchell, who makes Caesar's tendency towards functional Latin seem quite banal. How's this for summary of all that's currently wrong with the world?

We weave history out of the thread of our collective vanities and self-delusions. And yet our attempts to lord it over our ancestors, to present ourselves as their superiors and emancipators, usually say more about us than them. Thus it is that the television series Mad Men can reduce the pre-Woodstock 1960s to an endless gallery of repressions about to be unbound, of hypocrisies about to be uncloaked, of blindness and prejudice about to be exposed to the all-seeing eye of futurity.

Yet at the end of every episode we are bound to have an uncomfortable tingling sense that we enjoy the very hypocrisies we pretend to deplore, and luxuriate in the social conventions from which we pretend to have emancipated ourselves. The things we enjoy mocking about the past are often the very things we are concerned to deny about ourselves.

Oh dear, the schizophrenic society, and only the Victorian way will save us? Because we have a tendency to hypocrisy, just as any generation in the past has also had? Yep:

But here's the trick. Every single one of these social policy diagnoses points us back down the road from which we believed we had travelled. They all depend on questions of conduct, of demeanour, of wellbeing, of self-respect. They all invoke matters of personal agency and responsibility; even, as it might once have been said, of ethos. And how dismally, shockingly, Victorian is that?

But before we get to that point there's an unwholesome amount of blather of a typically conservative kind, involving straw dogs as arguments, with perhaps this my favourite:

We know -- in the unfashionably Victorian language of the Australian Institute of Family Studies -- that the development of a sociable temperament is an essential element of personal and familial wellbeing.

We know, likewise, that civilised functioning requires fragile resources of psychic peace, which are maintained only with difficulty in situations of acute financial or relationship stress. We know that a significant minority of men have a violent element in their personalities which they are unable or unwilling to control, and which is most likely to exhibit itself as they feel more socially marginalised and useless. We know poorer communities are much more violent than richer ones and that the most dangerous places in which to live are generally also the most dangerous places to be a married woman and a mother. And in knowing all these things, we also know already, more or less, why so many people are defined as homeless and what will best aid them in extracting themselves from this circumstance.

Well we also know that people are societies are still inclined to fight and choose war as a solution, not least the west in a Victorian way, and we know we have a world obsessed with nuclear weapons, and we know we still like to live in our own shit, and we know killing people is still considered a kind of conversion to a cause routine, and we know that there's abject poverty in the world, just not in my back yard old chum, and we know that we are still inclined to carry on about the world in a religious way, thanks in part to mindless Victorianism, and yet things tick along in a cracked way as you might expect from either a Roman, an American or a Chinese imperium.

And we also know that you would have to do a valiant job of plastering over the cracks of Victorian England to imagine its treatment of the poor and the homeless offered much of a guide to the modern world. Unless of course you happen to be David Burchel.

But that's not really the point. All Burchell wants to do is slag off the hideous effects of the nineteen sixties. Perhaps the best thing that baby boomers can now do is die off so that this old, utterly irrelevant cultural war can be put to bed, and the young can develop their own culture wars in peace.

That said, I have just one complaint. Couldn't Burchell just have said grow up, cut your hair, lose that beard, get a job or join the army, study Latin and Greek in night school, and become the perfect Victorian? Then you can go out and conquer the world, except perhaps for Afghanistan, which also proved tricky for the Victorians.

That way he could stop writing totally nonsensical propositions like this one:

We know the Victorians invented the modern idea of the social conscience.

What of course the Victorians did was invent the Victorian idea of social conscience. (The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians).

But it does provide a convenient riposte to Dan Ryan. Forget your Latin and your Greek. If David Burchell can so regularly and reliably distort history to suit his ideological needs, what's required is a rigorous exposure of the young to the follies of their elders. And only history can do that, as we regularly repeat the follies of past generations, and imagine these ideological follies to be entirely new ...

Now get out your Bembricks ...