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Not many people remember Malcolm Muggeridge. He was almost as famous as Gilbert Harding, and not many people remember him either. It is the fate of the television celebrity to be forgotten within half a century, if not half an hour. But Muggeridge – St Mugg for short – was more than a television celebrity. He rightly fancied himself as a prophet, though a fairly lecherous one until he turned to God. The old hypocrite then felt free to rant against the permissiveness of the age.
By the late sixties, students of Edinburgh University were no longer electing scientists and statesmen to the post of rector; they much preferred people from the box. In 1967, the year of the summer of love, they chose Muggeridge. He didn’t stick around long, quitting barely a year later in a tremendous row about free love, and was succeeded by another familiar face from television, Kenneth Allsop. But his brief tenure was memorable for the rectorial address, a thundering polemic on the evils of modern education. The following short extract gives a flavour of the occasion, and of Muggeridge:
In our society, the belief that the road to paradise is paved with A-levels is held at least as tenaciously as any article of Christian dogma in the days of Torquemada. No doubt we will go on raising the school age, enlarging our universities, increasing expenditure on education, until illiteracy multiplies so alarmingly that the whole process will be called into question.
The most striking thing about this passage, apart from the majestic assurance of the prose style, is the almost uncanny accuracy of a forecast made 45 years ago when ‘the whole process’ was still in its infancy. The education industry expanded exactly as Muggeridge prophesied, with the predicted consequences for the standards of literacy. Only the final part has failed to come to pass: far from the whole process being called into question, it continues on its disastrous path unchallenged. ‘Education, education, education’ – Tony Blair’s ludicrous election-winning slogan – is the rallying call of our time.
The more people are educated, the more language degenerates: there appears to be some inevitable but unexamined connection. Keith Waterhouse in his final years conducted a one-man vigil at the death bed of the apostrophe. He would have been delighted by my recent discovery of a dish called Egg’s Benedict. But Benedict the egg is just a routine solecism. For the unexpurgated version of our illiterate society, it is necessary to explore the dark world of the blog, where the principles of grammar and the felicities of expression were abandoned long ago if they were ever learned in the first place. The only slight surprise is that many bloggers claim to have been exposed to 12 years of compulsory schooling followed by a period of study in further or higher education.
Unlike most blogs, political language makes an attempt at formal composition, but the result is usually devoid of clarity or beauty. When Keith Brown, the Scottish minister for traffic disruption, opened his ‘resilience room’ in the bowels of St Andrew’s House earlier this week at the first puff of an autumn wind and said that ‘the focused response would remain’, it is possible that even he did not expect this meaningless phrase to be understood. I have a vision of Mr Brown holed up for the winter in the resilience room with a supply of sandbags and Rescue Remedy, receiving regular despatches from ’emergency response teams’ and municipal ‘tree squads’. But I am being unkind to Mr Brown. ‘The focused response would remain’ is almost sophisticated compared to the clunking awfulness of most speeches at the party conferences.
It has been a week of apologies and semi-apologies. Nick Clegg’s, fatuous in its original form, became more risible when the chief banalities were mercilessly repeated in the celebrated musical version. Andrew Mitchell is surely in the running for similar treatment. The Conservative chief whip has been fortunate to survive an incident in which he should have been arrested and allowed to cool off in a cell overnight. But the grievance in his case is misplaced. It seems to be not so much that he has the vocabulary of your below-average Saturday night thug as that he directed his abuse at police officers. Language, rather than its target, is the primary problem here. It ought to have disqualifed Mr Mitchell as a person fit to hold public office.
Until this week I was just about clinging to the illusion that teachers were fighting a rearguard battle against the barbarians. But the ghastly Jeremy Forrest, who ran off with a 15-year-old pupil, Megan Stammers, has finally disabused me. Forrest did not simply wish to go to bed with Megan. He ‘wanna wake up naked’ beside her. Wanna. In his blog – naturally he has one – Forrest wrote: ‘I was satisfied that if you can look yourself in the mirror and know that, under all the front, that you are a good person, that you should have faith in your own judgement’. What Forrest is doing with the unfortunate Megan is a matter for the courts. What should concern the rest of us is that a man with so little command of basic English ever got a job as a teacher. Is he a one-off? I fear not.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
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