July 15, 2009
Cultural Literacy: You're a lawyer. Get some.
[T]here was an element of cultural snobbery in my initial preference for things Gallic: their Romantics seemed more romantic than ours, their Decadents more decadent, their Moderns more modern. Rimbaud versus Swinburne was simply no contest; Voltaire seemed just smarter than Dr Johnson.
--Julian Barnes, b. 1946
Speaking of the French. Their school systems are reputed to teach children of all social classes the Arts and the Humanities, and more. To them, a true education is not a luxury, but a necessity for life. Knowing about the great ideas, books, languages, dance, painting and history of our world is not like an optional feature to a car--as Brit author Julian Barnes once characterized as the Western view in Something to Declare. A full and robust education is not just for rich.
And that is what makes the French so, well, French. The French, Barnes noted, are:
designed by God to seem as provokingly dissimilar from the British as possible. Catholic, Cartesian, Mediterranean; Machiavellian in politics, Jesuitical in argument, Casanovan in sex; relaxed about pleasure, and treating the arts as central to life, rather than some add-on, like a set of alloy wheels.
Don't let the French best you. Come live in the world. Education is not just about getting a job.
Posted by JD Hull at July 15, 2009 11:59 PM