CAN ONE TEACH "POLITICAL LITERACY"?

Abstract

In the burst of conscientious attention to the needs of society that appears to seize academics whenever the supply of students threatens their bread and butter, any discoveries about the usefulness of what they claim to know arouse a special interest. Would it not resolve many of the conflicts of today if the population at large were educated to the point of "political literacy"? A group of people in British public life have thought so and have published a report. Minogue however sets about this report with a profound scepticism and a deft and witty touch; his commentary, in which he predicts that the report will merely make of schools and universities "a breeding ground for quarrelsome bores," is almost unfailingly quotable. He dismantles the doubletalk that endows such terms as 'neutrality,' activity,' and 'deference' with quite arbitrary merits and demerits, and castigates the report for its blindness to what it is feasible to teach and what is not. The context of his remarks is the current political scene in Great Britain; but their applicability to the proper treatment of cant in higher education, like the incidence of that phenomenon itself, is universal.