A Life Beyond Boundaries Read Online Free PDF Page B

granted, having no idea that I was a member of almost the last cohort to benefit from it. This education was designed, quite conservatively, to reproduce, if you like, a bearer of an upper-middle-class tradition. With this kind of general education, a boy could still expect eventually to become a senior civil servant, a member of the political oligarchy, or a respected teacher in the old style.
    But the peaceful social revolution inaugurated by the postwar Labour governments was to create a mass of new high schools and universities much better adapted to the Cold War, American domination, commercial globalization and the decline of Empire. Youngsters needed to learn economics, business management, mass communications, sociology, modern architecture and science (from astrophysics to professional palaeontology). There was little use anymore for amateurism. Even the language was changing. The kind of old-fashioned BBC English I had learned to speak was under attack as class-ridden, and was gradually being replaced by more demotic versions. No one any longer saw much point in memorizing poetry at all, let alone poetry in languages other than English.
    Schools were changing too. The era of regular beatings, by teachers and older boys, was coming to an end. All-boy schools were under increasing democratic pressure to become coeducational, with the obvious consequences both positive and negative. I think that I was in the next to last cohort educated (and self-educated) through books, radio and black-and-white films. No television, almost no Hollywood, no video games, no internet. Not even typing, which I only started to learn in America after reaching adulthood.
    In a dim way, I could even sense this change in my own family. My brother was educated the same way as I had been. But my sister, seven years younger, and eventually a graduate from Oxford, was part of a new world just coming into being. Even between me and my more politically advanced and intelligent brother there was a marked difference. One measure of this was America. Until I actually went to the US, I had absolutely no interest in the place at all. I knew no American history, read almost none of the great American novelists, was increasingly bored or annoyed by American movies, and, as an ardent classical piano player, had only scorn for American pop music, about which I knew nothing. My brother, however, who had to endure my banging away at Bach and Schubert, retaliated with fortissimo playing of records of Latin American rumbas, and later Elvis Presley. I have to admit that even today, in spite of long residence in the US, many wonderful American friends, and an attachment to Black music of all sorts, I still feel, if not alienated, at least detached from American society and culture. But … my father had left behind a 1920s edition of Moby Dick ,fantastically illustrated by the brave communist Rockwell Kent. Herman Melville is still my no. 1 great novelist.
    There is one other, more professional, sense in which I was part of a ‘last cohort’. I arrived in the US in 1958, just before American university life underwent a fundamental change, analogous to what occurred in the UK. In the early and middle 1960s, the great machine that we call ‘theory’ was beginning to become visible. It began with the now antique ‘behaviourist’ revolution. Although I do not think that ‘theory’ came very naturally to a pragmatic, down-to-earth people, it had crucial effects. It made each discipline more eager to distinguish itself from its sisters and to set about inventing its own jargon.
    When I studied in the US, this change was barely under way, so none of my teachers complained if I took courses in history or anthropology. But by the late 1960s this was already becoming difficult. The irony is that, thirty years later, American scholars started to talk eagerly about multidisciplinary approaches without realizing that these might have already