"I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilization against these things. That's when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down."
Scruton was not shy about putting his convictions into practice. For a decade- 1979 to 1989- he was one of a number of Cambridge academics who took part in an underground education program in communist Czechoslovakia, smuggling in books, giving secret lectures, and holding exams in a cellar. Scruton was eventually caught and detained, which resulted in his being expelled from the country and being put on the Index of Undesirable Persons. He wrote a novel based on these experiences entitled Notes From Underground.
With a writer as prolific as Roger Scruton, there are any number of quotes on any number of topics that I could feature here. Indeed, he has previously made an appearance in my Quote of the Week posts. Today, I think that I will quote his diagnosis of what is wrong with modern education, something with which I find myself in total agreement.
And that is why, paradoxically, the postmodern curriculum is so censorious – in just the way that liberalism is censorious. When everything is permitted, it is vital to forbid the forbidder. All serious cultures are founded on the distinctions between right and wrong, true and false, good and bad taste, knowledge and ignorance. It was to the perpetuation of those distinctions that the humanities, in the past were devoted. Hence the assault on the curriculum, and the attempt to impose a standard of 'political correctness' – which means, in effect, a standard of non-exclusion and non-judgement – is also designed to authorise a vehement kind of judgement, against all those authorities that question the orthodoxy of the left.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
-Roger Scruton