{"id":263,"date":"2009-01-02T23:58:59","date_gmt":"2009-01-03T03:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=263"},"modified":"2009-01-03T01:09:18","modified_gmt":"2009-01-03T05:09:18","slug":"the-usefulness-of-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=263","title":{"rendered":"The Usefulness of Classics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another British policeman (Pumphrey) interrogates the headmaster (Crumwallis) of a worse than mediocre private school:<\/p>\n

\n

‘Hmmmm’, said Pumphrey. ‘You seem to do a lot of classics.’<\/p>\n

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

‘Yes, indeed’, he said. ‘We lay great stress<\/em> on them. So sad to see their decline — their so rapid decline — in other schools, elsewhere. But if the private schools will not be custodians of the great classical tradition, who will be?’<\/p>\n

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

(Robert Barnard, School for Murder<\/em>, 1983, ch. 9)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another British policeman (Pumphrey) interrogates the headmaster (Crumwallis) of a worse than mediocre private school: ‘Hmmmm’, said Pumphrey. ‘You seem to do a lot of classics.’ It was not the remark Mr. Crumwallis had been expecting, but he perked up, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}