R.OGER SCIlUTON
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nurturing. The lesson we should draw from the example is simple. While
traditional mathematics does confer power on those who master it, this is
not its purpose. Those who study mathematics are guided by autonomous
principles of mathematical thought, towards knowledge that is an end in
itself. There is no way of building an alternative mathematics around
some egalitarian agenda. To attempt
to
do so would be
to
replace math–
ematical by instrumental reasoning; the result would therefore not be
mathematics. The subject of mathematics itself resists politicization, for
the very reason that it is a field of knowledge.
The radical critique of the curriculum in the humanities likewise as-
. sumes the power relations that emerge from the traditional curriculum are
part of an agenda, the real but hidden purpose of teaching things this way.
This is
to
assume precisely what has yet
to
be proven: namely, that there
is no knowledge contained in the traditional curriculum. With that un–
proven assumption goes another: that you can build a rival curriculum
around a rival agenda and somehow be doing the same thing. However,
the supposed agenda of the traditional curriculum is not an agenda at all.
Such power relations as have resulted from studying it have not been the
goal of study but its innocent byproduct. To construct a subject around a
political agenda is precisely
to
relinquish the pursuit of knowledge and
to
abandon the claim
to
a place in the curriculum.
More interesting than the content of the radical curriculum, however,
is its social effect. Those who have taught their students
to
reflect on the
great works of civilization, and to enter into the critical relation with
them that these works invite and encourage, never have had
to
worry that
they were damaging their students or reducing their chances of success in
life. There has emerged from the traditional study of the humanities a
shared frame of reference, a body of substantive utterance and refined
expression, an understanding of the past and its uses, that could be de–
ployed in a thousand ways, allowing students
to
find their place among
contemporaries and communicate with them on equal terms.
I do not think that we can have the same confidence in the future of
those educated in the new curriculum, those who have learned nothing of
literature except how to deconstruct it, who see nothing in traditional
customs and institutions save the malign hand of patriarchal power; who
have studied, in place of the classics of our literature, the ephemeral prod–
ucts of the moment, devoted to issues that seem of overwhelming impor–
tance today but will soon be alive only in universities and scarcely even
there. The curriculum designed
to
empower the new classes and enable
them to seize their inheritance is more likely
to
remove from them their
only hope of competing on equal terms, by destroying the durable frame
of reference and the web of human sympathy that make serious commu-
