Culture vulture

I chatted with an old friend about university education. Though we go back many years, almost his entire life, he is my son's age, by the time he went to university university was almost unrecognisably different from the university I went to and society was very different too. My friend asked me what I studied at university. I left school believing that there are only three things worth studying, Latin, Greek and Mathematics. Where I picked up this piece of nonsense I don't know, but it was in line with my idea of becoming a cultured person. I was quite unprepared for university, but had enough of school. I thought that I was a grown up. Schools were for kids. The thought that I need to learn something at university that would help me earn a living never crossed my mind. You could leave school and walk into a job any day. Making money didn't concern me either. There were more important things in life than getting rich. I wanted to be a cultured, civilised man, and to attain that I had to understand ancient civilisation, language, and to understand science and rational thinking I had to understand mathematics. The reality was that I didn't have enough grounding in mathematics to cope with it at university level and had to give it up, and although I persisted with Latin, and a smattering of Greek, I didn't have a real flair for either. Ironically, I had just enough Latin to teach it, though at least one of my students far outstripped me in no time. He ended up becoming a Professor of Russian. However it appears that I somehow, far from intending to, projected an image of someone who knew much more than in reality I did. People thought of me as an 'intellectual' whatever that is, someone who has views out of step with popular views. Someone who knew me when we were both young, someone whose learning far exceeded anything I could ever aspire to said that at the time he was terrified of me. I must have had the look of a classical scholar that concealed my ignorance. Yet deficient as I am in scholarship and education, I have huge problems with the celebration of post-truth. I can't accept the idea that truth is negotiable, that my gut feeling is as valid as that of the opinion of scholars, scientists, experts. We don't know where this scepticism, doubts about empirical evidence might lead to, but decisions based on gut feeling, ignoring historical and scientific evidence caused tremendous harm in the past.