The culture wars proceed apace—or do they? To talk about fighting a
war is in some respects a cheering metaphor; it presupposes at least
the possibility of victory. But there are days when one feels that
the whole thing is really over, and that all that is left are the
mopping-up operations.

There was the recent gray dawn, for instance, when the government
issued its latest decrees for the teaching of literature in
schools. And here I must pause: the idea that it would have been
issuing any decrees at all in such a field would have seemed so
bizarre in the Britain of twenty or thirty years ago that it calls
for an explanation.

Once upon a time the British prided themselves on having a school
system which avoided heavy centralization and state control. In
those days the question of which authors were taught in schools would
have been largely decided by the schools themselves or by local
examination boards, which often received guidance from universities.
In 1988, however, the Thatcher government introduced the National
Curriculum—in effect, a core curriculum which all schools would now
be obliged to teach. The legislation had laudable motives: it was a
clear response to declining standards, especially (under the
influence of fashionable theorists) in the actual content of what
was being taught. But even at the time it was pointed out there were
two dangers. Firstly, the scheme was liable to be administered by
the same educationists who had helped