Once upon a time, when I was visiting Casablanca and strolling about the streets at all hours like a fascinated tourist, I came upon a company of six or seven students in a public souk cramming for their end-of-term examinations. It was two o'clock in the morning. These kids were so poor they had to avail themselves of the electric lighting in the city squares to do their late-night studying. They were the joint owners of one used and battered book, a copy of André Gide's L'Immoraliste, which they passed between them from hand to hand like the Gray Sisters' single eye in the Greek myth, their window on the world of literary scholarship. As I happened to be familiar with the text, having taught it several times in the past, I was invited to deliver an impromptu lecture-and-seminar on Gide and his complex relationship to North Africa. An unprepared teaching session transacted in a second language with an extemporaneous class in the middle of the night in a strange and remote country, it proved to be a decisive pedagogical moment, almost a conversion experience, which I have never forgotten. The colloquy lasted until sunrise after which we adjourned to a small café to continue the discussion over coffee and croissants. Finally, I was escorted back to my hotel where we exchanged well wishes and good byes, both teacher and students conscious of the fact that something extraordinary—and yet entirely natural—had just occurred.

I have rarely encountered a group of more committed students, struggling under crushing disadvantages, yet diligent in their outlook, applying themselves to mastering the same text that my own students tended to write off as just another irrelevant book, better managed under the auspices of Monarch Notes. These young people, for whom a park bench did duty as a library carrel, were obviously studying to pass a test. But what affected me most was the sense of conviction and desire, the disinterested (not uninterested) passion they brought to bear upon the text.

They were in love with learning, grateful for the privilege of staying up all night to listen to a teacher, trade ideas, ask questions, range far beyond the designated field of practical inquiry governed by the test, track connections with other books and writers (it occurs to me that Augustine, too, was North African)—that is, to begin to fill up the lack they had divined in themselves. In order to pursue their education, they considered it normal to work double time and more: none had fewer than two jobs, and two had become male prostitutes to finance their studies. Several were providing for their sisters at the same time. (They belonged to an Islamic culture whose gender arrangements I can't help but deplore, but whose people impressed me with their pluck and sophistication.) And they could believe only with difficulty my account of the indifference and torpor that characterized perhaps a majority of my own middle-class students' academic "careers." The contrast was, to put it mildly, instructive.

My students enjoyed heat in the winter and plentiful electric lighting at all times, owned their own books, had unlimited access to libraries and benefitted where necessary from loans and scholarships to assist them in pursuing their studies, yet their enthusiasm for learning and the seriousness with which they approached the exploration of a privilege could not even remotely compare with what I was observing in an unfurnished, late-night, public square. What I intuited then and fully apprehend now is that without a more or less equivalent degree of responsibility and determination on our part, an awareness of the value of literary studies and an ethical commitment to mastering our intellectual history and incorporating the wisdom and intelligence of the larger culture that ultimately sustains us, the world in which we live the society in which we live and which we take for granted will surely founder. This caveat applies equally to that portion of the teaching profession that has eagerly surrendered to romantic notions of student "empowerment"—another way of sustaining the status quo—and that is busy promoting the subversion of ancestral notions of authority, precedence, personal independence, intellectual rigour and the quest for determinate truth, doing so under the general rubrics like "sensitivity to the Other" and "postmodern indeterminacy." Regrettably, we cannot rely on a scattering of Moroccan students to march to our salvation.

An essential part of the responsibility on which we have reneged, as I have argued for years now, involves the recognition of the irremediable harm that the contemporary obsession with "structural reform" and administrative tampering in all the cultural domains, but primarily education, is doing to us. In today's world, reformers are almost always reactionaries, technicists or, to put it paradoxically, majoritarian elitists—or all three at once. Robert Frost, habitually skeptical of any kind of cultural engineering, preferred the term meddlers to reformers. One of the problems with reform, of course, is that it can never reform itself and meddlers, by definition, can never learn how to unmeddle. Another problem is that, structurally and endemically, it cannot recognize quality performance and considers independence of mind as an obstacle to uniform functioning—the fate, we recall, of Zamyatin's D-503 who made the catastrophic discovery that he had a soul. Finally, the reform mindset is utterly oblivious to the fact that nothing can replace the dedicated teacher in what I have elsewhere called "the educational transaction": not the latest pedagogical methodology, not systemic reconfigurations, not technological innovation and sophisticated hardware, and certainly not top-down management directives in the absence of meaningful consultation with the practitioners themselves whose experience is the primary and indispensable component in all such deliberations. When we speak of education, we should be aware that it all comes down to the teacher and the student working together in a congenial learning environment. The rest is, for the most part, mere busy-ness. As Ernest House has cogently argued in The Politics of Educational Innovation, personal contact is the basic element in educational change and in the undistorted diffusion of solid, complex and often difficult ideas. Impersonal modes of communication and supervening management paradigms are spectacularly ineffective and almost always intrusive and adulterating, which explains why large-scale reform programs "have been resplendent failures." "What constitutes an innovation for the administrator," House drily observes, "is not necessarily an innovation for a teacher."

The best academic dean my college ever had and who was—predictably—let go when his contract expired, refused to meddle in the life of the departments and happened as well to write intelligible English. One kiss of death is bad enough but this was doubly fatal. He was one of those whom the administrative apparatus in any discipline or field nowadays always perceives as a threat to its hegemony and mobilizes its resources either to disinform or to cast into outer darkness, as with Mr. Keating in the film Dead Poet's Society. I recall meeting one of our chief administrators, a Grima Wormtongue and professional sickenpod if ever there was one, after the decision not to rehire had been taken. "The contract has been terminated," he said, in the language of impersonal disengagement and moral evasion that has become our current mode of discourse. He could not suppress his delight at the result of the Board of Governor's vote and his eyes, I suddenly thought, had the murky gleam of sunlight seen through bird-droppings on a windshield. My next thought was something like controlled panic. The same fate that destroyed the career of that strangest of anomalies, an excellent academic dean, must increasingly befall the faithful teacher and the dedicated student, wherever these may be found, as it threatens to do to any honest and thoughtful person passionately engaged in social criticism or textual rebuttal.

This deferral of responsibility to a bureaucracy of unaccountable proxies, the refusal to think and act for ourselves and to resist the encroachment upon the autonomy of the individual by the industries of collective manipulation, and—not least—the surrender to a kind of magical thinking we have learned to call political correctness which assumes that by eliminating disturbing words and affecting certain forms of outward behavior we can eradicate the reality (but which only has the effect of disguising it or of suppressing some fundamental truths of our condition), together explain in large measure why the world we inhabit is ineluctably going under. Nor, if I may be permitted to remark now that I am about it, should we underestimate the powerful debilitating effect which the denaturing of language may have upon our critical effectiveness. One remembers Swift's devastating satirical deflation in Against Abolishing Christianity of merely nominal maneuverings, where he targets the conviction that by doing away with the signifier we can do away with the signified. "What, for Instance, is easier than to vary the Form of Speech" in order to banish "prejudices of education?" All we need do, apparently, is "enlarg[e] the terms of communion." Instead of applying such aggressive words as envy, pride, avarice and ambition to those who are guilty of such sins, why not simply replace them with indicative terms like Heydukes, Mamalukes, Mandarins and Potshaws? In this way, we need not offend with the truth. If the Whigs are about to fall into disfavour, why not merely call them Toftians? One thinks of the Clinton administration replacing the phrase "rogue states" with the euphemism "states of concern," a bit of rhetorical thaumaturgy that left the problem intact and even intensified it. Or even more to the point, of the elementary school principal who, bending to public pressure, struck the word "gun" from the spelling lesson, thereby, no doubt, ensuring the instant disappearance of such malign weaponry. Another such evasive buzzword, especially in the field of education, is "diversity." As Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente suggests, diversity is fine provided it does not entail any real differences. In any case, everything considered, the drift toward critical impact seems inevitable—or rather, it seems already to have happened.

What trammels and disables us is a variant of the hermeneutic circle or the Epimenidean paradox. We cannot repair education unless we repair the culture first—we must work from the outside in since, as Ernest House points out, the schools do not exist freely beyond the order of social institutions but are an integral part of them. Education, he writes, "can deviate only in the direction and to the extent that society allows." But we cannot repair the culture unless we are sagely educated in the humanistic disciplines by teachers who have not been shackled by their administrative masters and, equally, who have not succumbed to the social bromides, linguistic alchemy and ideological chauvinisms of the day. A tall order for a state of affairs in which time is short. The conundrum is dismaying.

To put the matter succinctly then: the book—that is, what Harold Bloom calls "deep reading"—has been superseded by an unbridled media apparatus predicated on the immediacies of the image, by the paradigm of technological innovation, and by the fetish of unmediated reform. Add to this the senseless proceduralism of the bureaucratic machine which reminds one of the Benjamenta Institute in Walser's Jakob Von Gunten, a school for butlers run by self-absorbed incompetents whose principal expertise is collecting fees for the sole purpose of making students ordinary; the corporate takeover of the educational agenda in order to promote a new kind of post-industrial peonage in which people are treated as mere designated functions in a vast supervisory and instrumental engine; and the shallow and pervasive presupposition that verbal tinkering and cosmetic engineering can alter an underlying reality—and we have the composite iceberg that has staved in the bows of the great vessel of a millennial civilization. Rarely have so many destructive factors come to bear at the same time on so vulnerable a human artifact as culture, to say nothing of education.

Not everyone will agree with these grim conclusions. Skeptics will ask: how, pragmatically speaking, are we to respond to and take our bearings from such a bleak terminus a quo? Indeed, I am put in mind in this regard of a brave poem from Lars Gustafsson's 1977 volume, Sonnets, reprinted in a collection translated under the title of one of his later books, The Stillness of the World Before Bach. There the poet faces the darkness welling up from within the rich and complex world after the great composer—a darkness from which he valiantly attempts to draw filaments of luminescence--and he listens for unexpected harmonies. Perhaps there is still hope?

Out of nothingness. Ex nihilo.
A song starts slowly. Music from the stone.
From stone contracted by the evening. Tone
sung by the siren stone. Ex nihilo.

River, tent, and branch, white bones dispersed
from cattle carcass here all things possess
shadows condensed into a nothingness.
The sharp-edged shadows are the things reversed.

As sharp as if a caged lark flew someplace
under the ground. Here things and shadows fall
together, meet, and are compressed. The slow

song of stone: this day of light and space
which makes each day before it seem too small.
A song starts slowly. Tone ex nihilo.

                  (trans. Yvonne L. Sandstroem)

And yet I do believe that the picture I have painted is an accurate reflection of our real situation, and that, if the truth does not necessarily set us free, it may at least make us strong. The likelihood that we now find ourselves in the very midst of the cultural end-game does not mean that we should stop playing or cease making moves that may still put off the inevitable checkmate, if only for a limited time. As Gwendolyn MacEwen writes in an early poem called "Mountain of Glory":"Hold fast/—and if shrink you must/Shrink last." Nor does it mean that we should refrain from hard thinking and adversarial commentary or that we should give up entirely on education (as if we could), which may be pursued outside the frame of the contemporary educational institution or maybe even dissidently within it—if one has the stomach and the stamina for it. Like Stefan Sikora's TRYGER, we need never give up, even when there's no chance to win. And who knows? We might get lucky.

And of course there is always the possibility that I may be mistaken. I hope the Titanic will right itself , make port, and get refitted. I would like to believe that a cynical and distracted citizenry will be moved one day to concerted action notwithstanding the perils entailed by such a venture. I hope that the intellectual attitude I met and observed at work in a public souk in an impoverished country will be somehow transposed to the private spaces of a wealthy and privileged culture. And I continue to abide by the conclusion of Ezra Pound's celebrated Pisan canto (LXXXI): "Here error is all in the not done,/all in the diffidence that faltered." But I am no longer optimistic. We are now well past the eleventh hour which once, long ago, merely signalled recess time.

Contributor's Note
David Solway is a poet and essayist. His most recent book is The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity (Toronto, 2007).