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As an educator, I have a lot of sympathy for Felipe Fern¨¢ndez-Armesto¡¯s lament about the sorry state of general knowledge (¡°Sorry, they haven¡¯t a?clue¡±, Opinion, 13 April); however, my (postmodernist?) mind cannot miss the irony of praising critical scepticism while blaming postmodern theories for replacing knowledge with information. Such theories advocate critical scepticism with regard to ¡°grand narratives¡±, exactly, one could argue, what Fern¨¢ndez-Armesto calls the ¡°glib certainties that his parents and teachers paraded¡±.

Also, I was startled to discover that ¡°we have extirpated every other kind of discrimination¡± and ¡°are at work to eliminate prejudice against stupidity¡±, which the next paragraph implicitly equates with vocational competence. Sadly, we are far from having extirpated any kind of discrimination, and arguing against all kinds of discrimination is not a form of political correctness gone mad, as Fern¨¢ndez-Armesto seems to imply. Moreover, proclaiming that ¡°erudition is elitist¡± and ¡°ignorance is egalitarian¡± is not helpful; it corroborates the ¡°grand narrative¡± that universities are bastions of the elites while mistakenly portraying the ideal of egalitarianism as the root cause of the problems.

Finally, I could not but LOL (laugh out loud) at the statement that ¡°in classical Athens the internet would have been full of philosophy¡± ¨C such an idealised and cartoonish representation of classical times is really what gives erudition a bad name.

Anna Notaro
@Notanna1
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee

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