Upon Receiving the 2001 Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature in Madrid

Once upon a time, and it seems a long time ago, there was a respected figure, the Educated Person. He — it was usually he, but then increasingly often she — was educated in a way that differed little from country to country — I am of course talking about Europe — but was different from what we know now. William Hazlitt, our great essayist, went to a school, in the late eighteenth century, whose curriculum was four times more comprehensive than that of a comparable school now, a mix of the bases of language, law, art, religion, mathematics. It was taken for granted that this already dense and deep education was only one aspect of development, for the pupils were expected to read, and they did.

This kind of education, the humanist education is vanishing. Increasingly governments — our British government among them — encourage citizens to acquire vocational skills, while education as a development of the whole person is not seen as useful to the modern society.

The older education would have had Greek and Latin literature and history, and the Bible, as a foundation for everything else. He — or she — read the classics of their own countries, perhaps one or two from Asia, and the best known writers of other European countries: Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the great Russians, Rousseau. An educated person from Argentina would meet a similar person from Spain, one from St. Petersburg meet his counterpart in Norway, a traveler from France spend time with one from Britain, and they would understand each other: they shared a culture, could refer to the same books, plays, poems, pictures, in a web of reference and information that was like a shared history of the best the human mind has thought, said, written.