I’ve written before about Private Eye’s Dumb Britain and the issues it raises regarding my pet subject, the question of what we are expected and what we expect others to know. Norma Postin, in the letter above, appears pretty certain that 19th century philosophers and their ilk are among the subjects where we shouldn’t assume knowledge, which may be a fair call. Where I do take exception is the implication that these subjects only enter your canon of knowledge if you’ve attended a certain type of school or university, and if you haven’t you’re condemned to eternal ignorance on the subject. Surely, if all your school taught you was to read, you’d have a chance to find out.
PS: Nothing to do with the above, but I’d normally assume that an article with the subhead “Barbie and Oppenheimer show us how in the heart of the darkest realities we stumble upon fantasies” was a spoof originating in The Onion or McSweeney’s or similar but since Slavoj Žižek is the author, who can tell?
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