Nothing to Lose
There is a ritual in English education. Every few decades, the prevailing intellectual fashion changes, and a remarkable number of people discover, almost simultaneously, that they have been mistaken about everything they previously believed. Positions once defended with evangelical certainty are unsubtly abandoned, old convictions acquire new qualifications, and ideas that were recently considered indispensable are suddenly found to be obstacles to progress. The transformation is often so swift that one might reasonably wonder whether the intellectual revolution occurred overnight, or whether the convictions were never quite as firmly held as their owners had led us to believe.
