I have a college degree, as do my wife, both of my parents, and all four of my grandparents. At least two of my great-grandfathers earned undergraduate degrees; I do not know how many others. The apple does not fall far from the tree. In fact, I am one of the only people in my family not to possess a graduate or professional degree as well. The apple sometimes rolls downhill.
Francis Bacon might applaud me if I were to set a trend. (For Dominic Green on Bacon’s greater contemporary, see page 51.) “Concerning the advancement of learning,” Bacon writes in a letter to King James I in 1611, “I do subscribe to the opinion of one of the wisest and greatest men of your kingdom: That for grammar schools there are already too many, and therefore no providence to add where there is excess.” Quite right. Bacon was advising the king with regard to the charitable disposition of property; why, in our day, does Harvard need another two-hundred-million-dollar “charitable” gift to pile into its fifty-seven-billion-dollar endowment? (For the editor on the proper beneficiaries of our charity, the poor, see page 24.)
But Bacon had another danger in mind. He continues, “For the great number of schools which are in your Highness’ realm doth cause a want, and doth cause likewise an overflow, both of them inconvenient, and one of them dangerous. For by means thereof they find want, in the country and towns, both of servants for husbandry and apprentices for trade; and, on the other side, there being more scholars bred than the state can prefer and employ, and the active part of that life not bearing a proportion to the preparative, it must needs fall out that many persons will be bred unfit for other vocations, and unprofitable for that in which they are brought up; which fills the realm full of indigent, idle, and wanton people, which are but materia rerum novarum.” At this point a pause is granted to the reader for purposes of smacking one’s forehead and shouting, “By Jove, he’s hit the nail on the head!” (For Theodore Dalrymple on one such revolutionary, Marat, see page 59.)
I did not read the Novum Organum and could not tell you how relevant or modern or pernicious its contents are (Paul J. Griffiths writes on another work of philosophy on page 28). But I have heard enough about contemporary elite overproduction, laptop class voters, and the overeducated and downwardly mobile to recognize our own times in Bacon’s warning. (For a portrait of those times, see Christopher Beha on page 19.)
The estate being charitably distributed to which Bacon refers is Charterhouse, then the property of Thomas Sutton, who turned it into an almshouse and a school. Bacon of course did not suggest giving it back to the Carthusian monks, who had been dispossessed of it and martyred nearly a century earlier.
I have a college degree, as do my wife, both of my parents, and all four of my grandparents. At least two of my great-grandfathers earned undergraduate degrees; I do not know how many others. The apple does not fall far from the tree. In fact, I am one of the only people in my family not to possess a graduate or professional degree as well. The apple sometimes rolls downhill.
Francis Bacon might applaud me if I were to set a trend. (For Dominic Green on Bacon’s greater contemporary, see page 51.) “Concerning the advancement of learning,” Bacon writes in a letter to King James I in 1611, “I do subscribe to the opinion of one of the wisest and greatest men of your kingdom: That for grammar schools there are already too many, and therefore no providence to add where there is excess.” Quite right. Bacon was advising the king with regard to the charitable disposition of property; why, in our day, does Harvard need another two-hundred-million-dollar “charitable” gift to pile into its fifty-seven-billion-dollar endowment? (For the editor on the proper beneficiaries of our charity, the poor, see page 24.)
But Bacon had another danger in mind. He continues, “For the great number of schools which are in your Highness’ realm doth cause a want, and doth cause likewise an overflow, both of them inconvenient, and one of them dangerous. For by means thereof they find want, in the country and towns, both of servants for husbandry and apprentices for trade; and, on the other side, there being more scholars bred than the state can prefer and employ, and the active part of that life not bearing a proportion to the preparative, it must needs fall out that many persons will be bred unfit for other vocations, and unprofitable for that in which they are brought up; which fills the realm full of indigent, idle, and wanton people, which are but materia rerum novarum.” At this point a pause is granted to the reader for purposes of smacking one’s forehead and shouting, “By Jove, he’s hit the nail on the head!” (For Theodore Dalrymple on one such revolutionary, Marat, see page 59.)
I did not read the Novum Organum and could not tell you how relevant or modern or pernicious its contents are (Paul J. Griffiths writes on another work of philosophy on page 28). But I have heard enough about contemporary elite overproduction, laptop class voters, and the overeducated and downwardly mobile to recognize our own times in Bacon’s warning. (For a portrait of those times, see Christopher Beha on page 19.)
The estate being charitably distributed to which Bacon refers is Charterhouse, then the property of Thomas Sutton, who turned it into an almshouse and a school. Bacon of course did not suggest giving it back to the Carthusian monks, who had been dispossessed of it and martyred nearly a century earlier.
