Oh, to be so wrong, and yet get some small part of it so right. I could spend hours "Fisking" this piece, pointing out all the racism, classism, and other bias in it, not to mention a few outright factual errors and false generalisations... I won't bother, as most of it should be relatively glaringly obvious.
Still, abstracted from his racist arguments, that primary reason is why I'm an avid and ardent proponent of (incidentally Canadian-style) standardised (public) school curricula! If one doesn't have at least a modicum of shared identity, you're not going to have much of a society.
On the other hand, where I differ from the writer of the original piece, I should point out that a modicum is about all that's required, and anything further is rubbing up against the territory of infringing on personal freedoms, culture, heritage, and all that stuff. I damn well support the idea of society looking like a "salad," but I'd like for everyone to realise that they are "ingredients" in that "salad," metaphorically speaking.
I speak three languages well enough to get by in, and two others marginally; I can cite empirical studies demonstrating that programmes like bilingual education are actually effective assimilation techniques; I think that much of the literary canon that Dalrymple seems to be spooging over is crap (and in fact tend to refer to it as "The Whitest and Deadest of the Dead White Men"), and I have very little tolerance for "high culture" in general, and even less for elitist Eurocentric snobs hiding their white supremacy under a veil of educated discourse...
(no subject)
Still, abstracted from his racist arguments, that primary reason is why I'm an avid and ardent proponent of (incidentally Canadian-style) standardised (public) school curricula! If one doesn't have at least a modicum of shared identity, you're not going to have much of a society.
On the other hand, where I differ from the writer of the original piece, I should point out that a modicum is about all that's required, and anything further is rubbing up against the territory of infringing on personal freedoms, culture, heritage, and all that stuff. I damn well support the idea of society looking like a "salad," but I'd like for everyone to realise that they are "ingredients" in that "salad," metaphorically speaking.
I speak three languages well enough to get by in, and two others marginally; I can cite empirical studies demonstrating that programmes like bilingual education are actually effective assimilation techniques; I think that much of the literary canon that Dalrymple seems to be spooging over is crap (and in fact tend to refer to it as "The Whitest and Deadest of the Dead White Men"), and I have very little tolerance for "high culture" in general, and even less for elitist Eurocentric snobs hiding their white supremacy under a veil of educated discourse...