Intrinsic Value of Knowledge

Intrinsic Value of Knowledge
"Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead
In a recent issue of the Telegraph appeared an article by Anthony O'Hear responding to an article by education minister Rammell. Mr. Rammell had said it is "not necessarily a bad thing" that there have been sharp falls in the number of students applying to study history and the classics at university.

I think it safe to say that had there been no Renaissance there would have been no Western civilization as we know it. Had there been no Western civilization you and I would live in an entirely different world. One, I suspect, far less appealing than this one.

Renaissance means rebirth; Renaissance was the rebirth of the Greek and Roman intellectual attitude. It was the recapturing of classical learning that was lost to the West during the period often referred to as the Dark Ages.

"It would be no exaggeration to say that European culture from the 14th century onwards has been defined by the way each age and each artistic movement has gone to the wells of ancient Greece and Rome, has drunk deep and has arisen refreshed and invigorated - every age, that is, until our own."

"We are depriving our children of knowledge of all of this in our futile efforts to be modern and focused on the instrumental. We are forging a new dark age, in which the decline of the study of history is also to be welcomed."

"Mr. Rammell would apparently have us rejoice in the fact that we have no sense of the past; but a person with no sense of the past is a person who is a stranger both to his or her own roots and to the human condition more generally. For human beings are not creatures of nature; we are inheritors of the history that has made us what we are. Not to know our history is not to know ourselves, and that is the condition not of human beings, but of animals."

"And the history of Rome is the source of the history of Europe, and the cradle both of Christianity and of the notion of the rule of law."

"Is it any wonder that, with no sense of our past or identity - as, in other moods, politicians increasingly complain - we are a culture obsessed with celebrity, football, and reality television? Most of our population knows nothing else, and they have no yardstick from either history or culture with which to judge. As long ago as the 1920s, the great (classicist) poet T S Eliot stared at what he saw as the collapse of European culture: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin." Most of us have no knowledge now even of the fragments. We, or our children, will have only a desolate sense of loss, but we won't know what it is we have lost. Welcome to Rammell's world."

• Anthony O'Hear is professor of philosophy at Buckingham University. His book Plato's Children (2006) is published by Gibson Square Books

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=M3CTLJ3COCBS1QFIQMGCFFWAVCBQUIV0?xml=/opinion/2006/02/17/do1701.xml