ABSTRACT
One of the nineteenth-century pieties to which T S Eliot was inimical and this fits with his instinctive dislike of sentimentalism and 'feel-good' mythologising was the notion that classical literature was some kind of unchangeable museum piece. He also had no time for those who defended the Classics out of nostalgia for a decaying social order, out of support for the country's public schools or out of the kind of 'sentimental Toryism' which regrets the decline of classical references in parliamentary debates. The essential problem with the 'liberal' tendency in education – as, in Eliot's view, with liberalism – generally is that 'it did not know what it wanted of education'. The national curriculum requirement to study history could be extended to sixteen, as is the case in many other education systems that value the past more than England's does, thus allowing more time for the study of classical civilisations.
