[lit-ideas] Re: What is the Purpose of a Pay Slip?
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2007 10:34:01 -0700
On Aug 11, 2007, at 4:49 AM, Judith Evans wrote:
I don't know how the US does this, what the UK does is give people
a little book with the answers to the questions (though not, presumably, in
Q and A format), quite some while before The Test.
Yes, there's a booklet here too. The reason the Pilgrims came to America is pure and simple, "They came for religious freedom." That's the sort of thing the book tells you...right or wrong...no room for debate.
What interested me about the British questions was that they seem to have abandoned story-telling as a national glue; there was nothing in the list about how the culture's assumptions came to be, and the shared myths it was once so important that schoolchildren learned. Instead, to begin to be British, you have to know what a quango is.
Presumably whatever has replaced the Victorian, Empire glue stories now develops later, when you belong to a community and learn its tales.
I'm not, as Conservatives do, making a case for a return to imagined history as the necessary binding stuff of nations--though I am about to teach a course about "Imaginary Scotland"--I'm just wondering what liberals believe holds a nation together. A sense of shared justice, I suppose. Which brings us back to quangos and how many people belong to this or that religious group?
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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