At the risk of making my posts obnoxiously frequent on this thread....
It occurred to me that Tolkien's
Hobbit sections in LOTR (that is, those chapters that occur in the Shire and reflect its society) function by themselves as a kind of Goldingesque "Animal Farm" type of parable. By no means do I mean to imply that Tolkien was writing allegory or merely socio-political commentary - I'm just struck all over again by this example of the applicability of his work - something severely lacking in most fantasy.
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But I don't go quite as far as Littlemanpoet in blaming the child-centred educational theory that became de riguer from the 60s onwards. As I said before, the complaint of falling standards and despair at 'how bad things have got' is a pretty consistent feature of cultural commentary since civilisation began!
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Your point is well taken, Kalessin, regarding the 'consistent feature'. However, the child-centered part of the educational theory was not the only aspect of the shifted standards that were historical in scope. Education moved away from the classics as it embraced modernism. We stopped learning Latin and replaced it with 'modern short story' and the like. We stopped reading the classics of literature and started reading - ahem - William Golding's Lord of the Flies. These were choices, and they looked good at the time, and to a certain extent they look pretty good to me now, but the crux of the issue for me with the educational reform was its resulting
disconnection from the past.