This has gone.

Greek and Latin are disappearing. In many countries the Bible, and religion — going. A girl I know, taken to Paris to broaden her mind, which needed it, though she was doing brilliantly in examinations, revealed that she had never heard of Catholics and Protestants, knew nothing of the history of Christianity or any other religion. She was taken to hear mass in Notre Dame, told that this ceremony had been a basis of European culture for centuries, and she should at least know about it — and she dutifully sat through it, rather as she might a tea ceremony in Japan, and afterwards enquired,"Are these people some kind of cannibal then?" So much for what seems enduring.

There is a new kind of educated person, who may be at school and university for twenty, twenty-five years, who knows everything about a specialty (computers, the law, economics, politics) but knows about nothing else — no literature, art, history — and may be heard enquiring, "But what was the Renaissance, then?" "What was the French Revolution?"

Even fifty years ago this person would have been seen as a barbarian. To have acquired an education with nothing of the old humanist background — impossi-ble.To call oneself educated without a background of reading — impossible.

Reading, books, the literary culture, was respected, desired, for centuries. Reading was and still is in what we call the Third World, a kind of parallel education, which once everyone had, or aspired to. Nuns and monks in their convents and monasteries, aristocrats at their meals, women at their looms and their sewing, were read to, and the poor people, even if all they had was a Bible, respected those who read. In Britain until quite recently trade unions and workers' movements fought for libraries, and perhaps the best example of the pervasiveness of the love for reading is that of the workers in the tobacco and cigar factories of Cuba whose trade unions demanded that the workers should be read to as they worked. The material was agreed to by the workers, and included politics and history, novels and poetry. A favorite of their books was The Count of Monte Christo.A group of workers wrote to Dumas and asked if they might use the name of his hero for one of their cigars.