Education, education, education: a triple curse, a multiplicity of meanings.
A cultured person, in my usage, is one who has received some inkling of what former generations utter to us from beyond the grave. We cannot hear the dead, but we may read their writings, and we can listen to what a reader may tell us. An uncultured person lives only in the present, not knowing the antecedents of anything. His world is missing a dimension.
In descending order of impact, we get our education from:
Natural curiosity and innate talent may, very rarely, overcome the obstacle of uncultured or stupid parents. For the small child the parent is the exemplar of natural behaviour. Even with loving parents, in a home without books, without fairy tales or without curiosity, how can the child possibly become cultured? It is not a question of means or of class. A book usually costs less than a visit to the pub, and is likely to put you in wiser company. In the world outside, thickly besieging the child's home, lie beasts that would feed off his ignorance, just as they fed off his parents'. Education, education, education is their slogan and they lick their chops.
After the age of five or so, the influence of the parent is replaced by the influence of the peer in age. Now it becomes a matter not so much of gaining wisdom as of avoiding folly. The evils, or the absences of good, that the child's playfellows have received from their own parents, now enter the ring. The influence of other children becomes a threat, not necessarily to his parents' plans for him, but to his own chances of getting an education. We are social animals, and have been since before the discovery of fire, and we learn how to make friends and enemies without having any lessons in the arts of society; and without the guidance of wise adults, soon begin worshipping the Lord of the Flies. It stands to reason then, that the parents' first responsibility towards their child is to secure an environment where he is shielded from the poisonous influences of other children, and from an uncultured milieu.
A teacher with less intelligence than his pupils is a tragic recipe for boredom and mischief. That is why teachers have for generations been paid wages that will only attract the less able. The maintenance of this old tradition is the surest and most effective way of ensuring that, whatever the headlines, children do not actually profit from school. That most parents are incapable of educating their children, even if they wished to, any government can take for granted (by government I mean the press, commerce and their creatures). That most children will find themselves sucked into a feral culture of ignorance means that our thoughtless greed and materialism are safe for another generation. Schools, I reiterate, have only a minor role to play, but in any case the policies of Education, education, education are there to shut the last bolts on the door.