Even Cambridge University is Getting Dumbed Down

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 13, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

Eddication ain't what it used to be, no where, no how. There's dumbing-down goin' on all over. In fact, the London Sunday Telegraph recently reported that undergraduates at famed Cambridge University in England had to answer a question on their final examinations this last term about, well, the Bee Gees, the rock group that dates from the 1960s and had such hits through the years as "I've Gotta Get a Message to You," "Stayin' Alive" and "Night Fever."

The question about a lyric from a Bee Gees song came as part of a three-hour compulsory paper that had to be written about tragedy. The students, challenged no doubt to the profoundest depths of their abilities, were asked to write their thoughts on the lines, "It's tragedy ... Tragedy when you lose control and you got no soul, it's tragedy," from a 1979 Bee Gees hit, according to a dispatch from Reuters.

"I would have thought that a top-flight university such as Cambridge would concentrate on high culture rather than ... some poor pop group," was the understandable response of Nick Seaton, chairman of the (aptly named) Campaign for Real Education.

But then, with a fatuousness that was breathtaking, John Kerrigan, chairman of the English final-examinations board, defended the question: "There are elements to the Bee Gees' songs that could have directed you to the great central canonical texts," he said, surely with his fingers crossed behind him.

"The line in the Bee Gees' song where [the vocalist] sings, `the feeling's gone and you can't go on' is a fair summary of the end of King Lear" claimed Kerrigan. But, for the people wonders, why not just read Shakespeare's King Lear itself-- which describes that feeling of desperation in these words: "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport," and "You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face."