Thomas Mann

Uit Thomas Mann (De Toverberg)

It was a particular bit of impudence on little Naphta’s part to call Herr Settembrini, the declared servant of progress, a conservative. They all felt it –most bitterly, of course, the gentlemen in question, who twirled his sweeping moustaches while he searches for a counterblow, giving his foe time to engage in further attacks against classical models, against the rhetorical literary tradition of European Education and schooling, with its mania for grammatical form, which only served the interests of bourgeois class domination and had long since become an object of ridicule among the masses. Yes, these gentlemen had no idea what a huge joke all our doctors degrees, our whole mandarin educational system, was to the masses, how they ridiculed our public grammar schools, that instrument of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, maintained under the delusion that by watering down scholarship one educated the common folk. The masses had long since learned that for the education and discipline needed in the battle against the decaying bourgeoisie they should look elsewhere than to coercive schools imposed by the authorities; and by now every idiot knew that the school system developed from the cloisters of the Middle Ages was as anachronistic and absurd as a periwig, that no one owed his real education to schools anymore, and that free, open instruction by public lectures, exhibitions, films, and so forth was far superior to that found in any schoolroom. (p. 617-618)

(gemaild door Geert)