Of Critics and Lecturers

In Salient 23 Gordon Campbell states: "...one of the arguments against freedom advanced at the meeting (with the English Department) was that at 17 a student didn't know what to choose and therefore had to be told by the Department. The existence of zombies like this, of course, is an indictment of our high school system. But is that any reason to perpetuate the dependent relationship at the university level?"

A few pages later the same gentleman begins a reviews of Orff's "Carmina Burana" with: "This doesn't sound too promising. So who really needs 700 years old poems set to music in 1937 by a German music teacher? You'd be surprised, this is one of the most exciting, colourful works in the classical repertoire."

What prompts Mr Campbell to assume that, while the average student in the English Department knows so much about English literature that he ought to be able to choose his own texts, the same student is at the same time (by Mr Campbell's own suggestion) totally ignorant of one of the most famous works of 20th century music? And if Mr Campbell so dislikes "the dependent relationship", why does he take for granted in his review that the reader is in just that relationship to him?

Peter Russell