{"id":456,"date":"2009-01-02T23:57:11","date_gmt":"2009-01-03T03:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=456"},"modified":"2009-01-03T01:08:09","modified_gmt":"2009-01-03T05:08:09","slug":"the-usefulness-of-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=456","title":{"rendered":"The Usefulness of Classics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Another British policeman (Pumphrey) interrogates the headmaster (Crumwallis) of a worse than mediocre private school:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8216;Hmmmm&#8217;, said Pumphrey. &#8216;You seem to do a lot of classics.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>It was not the remark Mr. Crumwallis had been expecting, but he perked up, as he frequently did in interviews with parents, when an opportunity for fraudulent self-congratulation presented itself.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Yes, indeed&#8217;, he said. &#8216;We lay <em>great stress<\/em> on them. So sad to see their decline &#8212; their so rapid decline &#8212; in other schools, elsewhere. But if the private schools will not be custodians of the great classical tradition, who will be?&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Mike Pumphrey did not feel called upon to reply. He wondered whether, in view of the decline of classics elsewhere, classics teachers might not be in a state of glut upon the market, and therefore to be had cheap. He rather thought they might be. He looked cynically at Mr. Crumwallis, swelling with spurious pride.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p align=\"right\">(Robert Barnard, <em>School for Murder<\/em>, 1983, ch. 9)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another British policeman (Pumphrey) interrogates the headmaster (Crumwallis) of a worse than mediocre private school: &#8216;Hmmmm&#8217;, said Pumphrey. &#8216;You seem to do a lot of classics.&#8217; It was not the remark Mr. Crumwallis had been expecting, but he perked up, as he frequently did in interviews with parents, when an opportunity for fraudulent self-congratulation presented [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-ive-been-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":458,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions\/458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}