A year or two back, my small town in New Hampshire completed the decades-long process of educational "consolidation" and closed our last one-room schoolhouse--a fine 1839 clapboard academy atop a hill overlooking a small settlement. For the last thirty years, it had been used as the town kindergarten, but now the little ones have gone downhill to join their siblings in the first-to-eighth grade school. The town isn't sure yet what to do with the building, so the classroom's been tidied up and decorated with some surviving artifacts of its illustrious past. On the blackboard is a typical math exercise of the mid-nineteenth century: "If 46 yards of cloth cost 53 IOS 6d, what is that per yard?" The tattered volume from which it's taken sits on a pupil's desk three rows back, with the names of several of the town's oldest families inscribed inside. It's an American book published in 1855--a time when children were required to do compound division not only in their own decimal currency but in the more awkward coinage of distant lands.

I wonder how many elementary school pupils today could answer that question? I wonder how many of their teachers could? I wonder how many would be able to tell you what "sterling" was and of which country it was the currency? If you object that, in an age of computers and calculators, nobody needs to be able to do long division, the vast army of Americans mortgaged to the hilt and drowning in credit-card debt suggests otherwise. We don't buy yards of cloth so much, but how about "If North Country Chevrolet offers you a two-year lease for twenty-four thousand miles at $299 per month with $750 down, how much are you paying per mile (Vermont residents add sales tax)?" or "If MCI calls up and offers you a calling plan of 12 per minute off peak ...?".

A few miles down the road from our abandoned academy is our triumphantly consolidated elementary school. You know when you're getting near because a sign tells you, as it does in every town in the state, that you're now entering a "Drug-Free School Zone." I loathe that sign not because of any drug danger, real or perceived, but because of the priorities it implies: it seems the best we can hope for from a public education system is that our children aren't heroin dealers by the time they've been through it. But why stop there? Why not "You Are Now Entering a Latin-Free School Zone"? That, at least, is beyond dispute.

In England and Wales, according to a recent survey, pre-Romantic poetry has almost vanished from the classrooms--not because the pupils can't understand it, but because the teachers can't. Pope? Milton? Marvell and his "Coy Mistress"? Love to help you, mate, but I can't make head or tail of it. On the other hand, an inability to understand the language is no obstacle to being able to "empathize" with previous generations. "Empathy" is what passes for history in most British and North American schools these days: you'll be asked to "empathize" with a West African who is sold into slavery and shipped off to the British West Indies, or with a hapless Native American who catches dysentery, typhoid, gonorrhea, a heavy cold, and an early strain of HIV by foolishly buying beads from Christopher Columbus.

The exercise would be worthwhile if we genuinely "empathized" with them: the Indian might be motivated by greed or lust or fury, the black slave might be fatalistic, optimistic, indifferent. But that's not what educational "empathy" is about: instead we're supposed to assign the slave a contemporary African-American identity and thereby understand his sense of injustice; we're supposed to acknowledge the Native American as the first victim of European racism. It seems the Indians never scalped anyone, unless you count the mass frontal lobotomy they've metaphorically performed on the teachers' unions. This is the very opposite of "empathy"; it's the projection of our drearily limited obsessions--racism, sexism, imperialism, homophobia--over the rich canvas of the past. That's the thing about "diversity" and "multiculturalism": they lead, paradoxically but remorselessly, to homogeneity and parochialism.

Funnily enough, across the corridor in the English classroom, the teacher is less happy to trust to our "empathy." As a child, I read all kinds of books, good and bad: Tom Sawyer and Tom Brown, Treasure Island and C. S. Lewis, Sir Walter Scott and Anne of Green Gables ... I had no idea that these books were not "relevant" to me. I was aware that most of these children lived lives that differed from mine to one degree or another--in Enid Blyton, the "Famous Five" exist on a diet of ginger beer and vealham-and-egg pie, neither of which I'd experienced. But it never occurred to me that such details were preventing me from "relating" to these stories. A child has no very precise sense of time, of anachronisms, of obsolescence, of whether his adventures are set in the 1950s or 1920s or 1700s--or what those designations mean: his imagination soars free of such considerations. Back in small-town New Hampshire, when the Congregational Church celebrated its bicentenary, a little boy, impressed by the pageant, said to the elderly lady who'd organized it, "Wow! You mean you do this every 200 years?".

There will be time enough later on to fence ourselves in with superficial prejudices and define ourselves generationally: baby boomers or Gen Xers, disco or grunge, "Brady Bunch" or "Beavis and Butt-head" ... In those first formative years, a child's mind is untrammeled: he or she doesn't notice that Huck Finn and Heidi are "out of date"; the concept, at that age, is meaningless. It's only a problem for our educators, projecting onto their charges the same misbegotten "empathy" they tout for America's victim classes.

Wander into the children's section of the bookstore and pluck at random. Jacket copy for Lois Ruby's Skin Deep: "Dan was her best friend, her boyfriend, a good guy. He'd always been a little withdrawn, but he never seemed like the type to hate people for the color of their skin. Or for what they believed. Laurel soon realizes that Dan's in too deep. That her boyfriend has become a neo-Nazi skinhead." Or John Neufeld's Almost a Hero: "Ben is convinced his spring vacation has been ruined by his social studies teacher's assignment--a week's volunteer service for a community charity. Haunted by something dark in his own past, Ben chooses to work at Sidewalk's End, a day care center for homeless children. When Ben believes he sees Batista, one of the Sidewalk's End kids, being abused by his mother at a grocery store, he is frustrated by his inability to get the authorities to act to protect the child.".

These two approaches--false "empathy" and bogus "relevance"--were not cooked up by the public schools in isolation; they run right through contemporary culture. What is Demi Moore's version of The Scarlet Letter but an especially severe case of misplaced "empathy"? The past is history. That's to say, it's history in the sense of that robust and revealing American formulation: "Bob Dole? Aw, he's history!"--as in fuhgeddabout him, he's through, he's washed up, he don't mean diddlysquat, he won't trouble us no more, we need pay him no further heed. He's history.

It's a superb phrase, awesome in its contempt, exhaustive in its concision, and a fine catchphrase for the times. If a living culture has traditionally been a dialogue between the present and the past, then today one side has fallen silent--or, at any rate, been drowned out. In the din of the present--the bass line of the CD thudding from the apartment downstairs, the TV flickering away in front of the bored gas station clerk, the bleep-bleep-bleep of the video arcade--our ancestral voices have a harder time than ever making their presence felt. When was the last time you heard a politician quote a Greek or a Roman, or anybody before Churchill? In 1940, Leo Amery, speaking in the House of Commons after the fall of France, rebuked Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues thus:.

I will quote certain other words. I do it with great reluctance, because I am speaking of those who are old friends and associates of mine, but they are words which, I think, are applicable to the present situation. This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.".

Maybe someone should try that with President Clinton. Then again, maybe it's too long for a soundbite. There was pop culture in 1940, even within the Palace of Westminster: the MP A. P. Herbert was a successful humorist and lyricist and the author of the popular song "Other People's Babies." Across the Atlantic, there was Pal Joey and Major Bowes, Superman and Fantasia, Jack Benny and the Andrews Sisters--and a new hamburger restaurant started by a couple of Pasadena movie-theater owners, Richard and Maurice McDonald. But, in those days, pop culture was not the only vernacular in which the business of the nation was translated.

A present-tense culture is bound to be narcissistic, but, even so, its impregnability is impressive. Recently, Reebok was startled to be attacked by various women's groups for launching a new brand of footwear called "Incubus." It's not necessary to subscribe to the feminist argument that an incubus is a sort of prototype Clarence Thomas to wonder why, having spent a fortune on market research and focus groups and target testing, Reebok couldn't have given some intern fifteen bucks to go around the corner and buy a dictionary. Although most commentators described it as a Latin word, it's in my Pocket Oxford, quaintly considered part of the English language, albeit in the early pre-Ebonics phase of its development:.

INCUBUS n. oppressive person or thing; evil spirit visiting sleeper.

No doubt one day the company will unveil the Reebok Gulag: the word tested well with the focus groups, who agreed it evoked the sophisticated Continental chic they look for in a running shoe. Each night, it seems, the evil spirit steals upon our sleeping form and sucks away a little bit more of what we once took for granted.

Shortly after the basketball player Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive, an "AIDS educator" appeared on the TV news and declared that her organization had been overwhelmed by callers anxious for information on "safe sex." Johnson's disclosure had so raised the public profile of the pandemic, she said, that to her and her co-workers it had become a kind of dividing line: A.M. and P.M. As she explained helpfully, A.M. stood for After Magic, P.M. for Pre-Magic. You might have expected someone in the office to say, "Hang on, in the normal course of the day doesn't P.M. come after A.M.? D'you think there's any reason for that?" I learned about ante meridiem and post meridiem at the age of seven, when, in an introduction to the classics, our teacher drew our attention to Latin phrases in everyday use. Until that news bulletin, it had never occurred to me that for others it might be the sort of rarefied arcana you'd have to do a BA in to ever stumble across.

In deference to that "educator," I think we should call this condition PMS--Post-Media Solipsism. The information super-highway seems to be a kind of giant rotary in which we go round and round colliding only with the other flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. For the most advanced case, look no further than the president during the 1996 campaign: "The last time I checked, the Constitution said, 'Of the people, by the people and for the people. That's what the Declaration of Independence says.".

Well, of course, he didn't check. He doesn't have to. The Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address? What's the diff? Abe Lincoln? He's history. Indeed, the fate of Bob Dole's presidential candidacy, built on his poor doomed offer to be "the bridge to that better past," is instructive. When President Clinton, hijacking his opponent's metaphor, reconstructed it as "the bridge to the twenty-first century," he and his triangulating pollsters understood that a modern, electronic culture exists in a state of perpetual anticipation: even as the credits of your favorite sitcom start to roll, the screen consigns them to a tiny corner and a trailer commends the delights of the next, even funnier sitcom--or, as they say before the breaks on "Entertainment Tonight," the celebrity gossip magazine which so seamlessly follows the network news in most American cities, "Coming up! A minor character in a soap opera shoots her new swimsuit calendar--and ET has an exclusive preview!" (I quote from memory.) No matter that the item, by the time it arrives, seems barely longer than the clips and promos and teasers that have preceded it: by then something else will be coming up. When we reach that bridge to the twenty-first century, we'll be sitting in gridlock with the same old crack users, gangsta rappers, Indonesian caffeine addicts, and pre-op transsexual Hawaiian honeymooners, but by then the president will have moved on to the "new promise" of a bridge to the twenty-second century, or the fourth millennium, or a week next Tuesday--all coming up!

President Clinton is only the most brazenly fatuous co-opter, but these days all "forward-looking" states subscribe to the same philosophy: the past is something to be left behind. The members of the European Union, for example, are committed, by binding treaty, to "an ever closer union": in the end, therefore, efforts by British Conservative Euroskeptics to maintain, say, the United Kingdom's right to sell beer in imperial pints are bound to fail. The uniform metric Eurostein can be postponed, but never vanquished: forward momentum is a permanent constitutional condition of the Union. And when can it ever be deemed close enough?

Similarly, my native land, Canada, recently changed the motto on its coat of arms. After the flag, this is the second most visible formal emblem of the nation, embossed on the fronts of our passports and most official documents. Ever since the Dominion of Canada was established in 1867, the motto has read, "A Mari usque ad Mare"--from sea to sea. It's now being augmented by "Desiderantes Meliorem Patriam"--they desire a better country. Why not go all the way and just say "Canada--A Work in Progress"?

There was no parliamentary debate about the new motto: we just woke up one morning and discovered, thanks to a disgruntled opposition MP, that there it was. Brushing aside pedantic criticisms, the minister responsible said she couldn't see what all the fuss was about: they'd sent the proposed change to the Queen, she'd liked it and had been happy to approve it. This buck-passing was, in its way, even more shameless than the new motto: it's a fundamental constitutional practice in Commonwealth countries that the sovereign doesn't personally endorse the actions done in her name; they're the responsibility of her ministers. The disregard for constitutional proprieties, as much as the discarding of history, tells us much about the "better country" they so desire.

But then uneasy lies the head that wears the crown in a sound-bite culture. In Britain, forced to defend the monarchy from recent self-inflicted embarrassments, Conservative MPs tend to say things like, "Well, it's jolly good value for the money. The Royal Family brings an awful lot of tourism into the country." It's a pop culture response: Lady Di as a dysfunctional Minnie Mouse. But how else to explain it? The thinly veiled republicans on the Labor and Liberal benches tend to propose curtailing the Crown's powers or abolishing the House of Lords because, so they reason, if you were starting today, you'd never do it that way.

That's the point: we don't need to start today. The Liberal Party is resentful that the institutions of so many European countries seem more modern than Britain's, but that's because those nation states fail every generation or two and have to start from scratch. The West's successful nations--which broadly speaking are the English-speaking ones--have somehow managed, in defiance of the old countryman's advice, to get here from there. It says much for the degree to which the obsession with novelty has infected every area of life that our institutions' longevity should now be their principal offense. Progressive opinion, for example, has long held that British judges and barristers should abandon their wigs and robes because ordinary members of the public are unnerved by them.

The condescension is exquisite: ordinary members of the public aren't unnerved by Elton John wearing a Versace dress in The Sunday Times, or Dennis Rodman and Mayor Giuliani. But we aren't surely such novelty junkies that we don't see the antiquated garb for what it really is: a reassurance--that the justice system predates the fads and fashions of the present day. In the Caribbean, the speakers of those tiny, British-derived island parliaments love their wigs and maces and copies of Hansard: they advertise, in stark contrast to their neighbors in Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, their peaceful constitutional evolution. Unlike the American multiculturalists, they see no shame in acknowledging the origins of their institutions.

It's a different story in Canada. On the coat of arms, above the motto and below the crown, you'll see the English and Scottish lions, the Irish harp and the French fleur-delis. These four peoples built the Canadian state, on traditions inherited from home (parliamentary democracy) and institutions constructed on site (the Hudson's Bay Company, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Pacific Railroad). One day, we'll wake up and they'll be gone, too. The official version of the modern state can be seen on the bus posters advertising the fiftieth anniversary of Canadian citizenship: "Canada--It Means the World to Us," and underneath stand representatives of every conceivable ethnic background holding hands around a globe as if they'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmoneeee.

A generation ago, Canada decided to reinvent itself as a round-the-clock Coke commercial, establishing a minister for multiculturalism and a Canadian Consultative Council of Multiculturalism. Many countries adapt and evolve and drift far away from their roots, but Canada, uniquely in the civilized world, simply junked its past. One reason I'm sympathetic to Francophone nationalism is that I think Quebeckers have a point: how can they trust Ottawa to protect French-Canadian culture when Ottawa couldn't even be bothered protecting English-Canadian culture? I happen to be an Irish-Belgian-Canadian, but it's absurd to maintain that the Irish contribution to Canadian history can be ranked no higher than the Belgian contribution. It's difficult even in a dictatorship convincingly to substitute a fiction for history: when its phoniness is self-evident, public cynicism is inevitable. The tragedy for Canada is that, when Quebec does leave, there'll be nothing left: they tore down the old Brittanic Dominion and couldn't find anything to put in its place.

Canada doesn't see it that way, admittedly. Its champions are forever trumpeting this or that United Nations survey showing that it's the best country in the world. The reason, obviously, is that Canada is the country that best approaches the condition of the United Nations. Far away from Canada, those peoples hung up on history are doomed as irredeemably recidivist: if only the Balkans would cease refighting their ancient quarrels; if only those Serb irregulars could be prized free from time-honored traditions like genital severing and just watch rock videos like normal people.

On a recent BBC documentary about Northern Ireland, after some footage of an Orangemen's pipe-and-drum marching band noisily commemorating some or other glorious victory of King Billy, the urbane English commentator remarked laconically, "Some of us wonder why can't the Unionists just pipe down?" If you dropped Belfast and Londonderry in the middle of the United States, they'd be two of the safest cities in the country, with annual murder rates that would tally up to an average weekend in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or Gary, Indiana. But, because they're killing each other not in drug deals and drive-by shootings, liquor store holdups and domestic disputes but rather in an ongoing feud rooted in hundreds of years of history, it's deplored as a terrible tragedy. When President Clinton insists on his commitment to "advance" the peace process in Ulster, the British Government should politely inquire as to the murder rate in his own capital city. But they don't, of course: they, too, are wedded to their "initiatives," creatures of a culture where everything is always in play, up for grabs.

This idea of the nation as an ongoing one-way street is a curious one. To be sure, our most enduring stories are of epic journeys into the unknown, but they also involve returning to the certainties of home--not just in Homer (well named), but also in The Lord of the Rings, which several recent British literary surveys are touting as "the book of the century." To take a comparable American fable, for Dorothy the point of following the Yellow Brick Road was to get back to Kansas. Last November, Bob Dole wanted to get back to Kansas, while Bill Clinton believed we should follow the Yellow Brick Road for no other reason than that it leads away from where we are now. As the poet Thom Gunn wrote, shortly before moving from Britain to America, "You're always nearer by not keeping still.".

The question is: nearer to what? It's not so much that the pace of change is constantly accelerating as that change itself has changed. In the first half of this century, the pattern of our days altered drastically: we began to move about by cars, and airplanes, and to converse by telephone; the invention of the elevator spurred the invention of the skyscraper; electric lighting and refrigerators made the old lamp-lighter and the iceman redundant; self-raising flour and washing machines helped eliminate the need for domestic servants; the outhouse moved indoors. A young man, propelled by an H. G. Wells time machine from 1897 to 1947, would be flummoxed at every turn. By contrast, a young man, catapulated from 1947 to 1997, would, on the surface, feel instantly at home. In the second half of the century, hardly anything has changed: our bathrooms, our washers, our kitchens, our high-rises, our cars and planes have barely altered.

But, after a while, the young man from 1947 would begin to notice a few differences--not technological so much as psychological. Of a mind to take in a show or a movie, he might pick up The Village Voice or The Boston Phoenix and find himself confronted with pages of ads for unspecified services available by calling 1-900-287-SLUT, 1-800-890-TITS, or 1-800-333-ANAL. Even more than the fact that such services are freely--or rather expensively--available, he might be surprised to find himself in a world where, when a prospective customer calls the telephone company to set up a phone line or two and the service representative asks was there any particular number you had in mind and the customer inquires whether 1-888-GAY-REAR is still available, the phone company--the heirs of Alexander Graham Bell--says "1-888-GAY-REAR? No problem. It's yours, sir." (The numbers quoted are all real, so, if you dial them up, make sure you have a credit card handy.) Every invention has unintended consequences, but it's hard to avoid the suspicion that, after a century of continuous mechanization, the unintended consequences are the only ones left; the touchtone phone has had a few peripheral benefits, but its principal effect, like that of so many others, is to nudge us further down the road to social isolation.

The argument in favor of these novelties is usually a First Amendment one--that America's Founding Fathers had cannily foreseen the inventions of phone sex and gangsta rap and took great care to bequeath us their posthumous endorsement. The discovery of these and other latent rights is the constitutional equivalent of "If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing 'Bay-watch ": it depends on the theory of continuous forward propulsion, and the assumption that there are no absolutes, no standards; there can be no lines drawn in the sands of time. If you venture unease about Snoop Doggy Dogg singing "Don't muthafuck with me, you muthafucker," you'll be told that ah, yes, but once upon a time the waltz was considered shocking.

When C. Delores Tucker and William Bennett met with Time Warner to protest the company's involvement in gangsta rap, one executive responded, "Elvis was more controversial in his day than some rap lyrics are today." In a way, that's even more alarming--for it presupposes that pretty soon we'll get used to Snoop and 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. and that one day at the Elks' or the Legion hall we'll raise a glass to Irv and Mildred's fiftieth anniversary and they'll whirl out on the floor as the band plays that old favorite they used to dance to when they were courting: "Yo, Bitch! Sit on This." And we'll all sigh, "Ah, why don't they write 'em like they used to?" and moan about what the kids are listening to today. If in forty years we've gone from Elvis to the Dogg, where will we be in another forty years, or even twenty?

Throughout this century, American innovation has been brash and raucous--as it was (though it's hard to believe) in the British Empire at its zenith. But, underneath the noise, there were certain assumptions. In 1934, for example, there was a pop hit called "Love Is Just Around the Corner," whose middle section ran:.

Venus de MiloWas noted for her charmsStrictly between usYou're cuter than VenusAnd what's more you've got arms.

This isn't some chichi showtune; it was a big song in a popular movie and it became a best-selling record for Bing Crosby. Its authors, Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin, are unknown outside the songwriting community. But, back in 1934, Robin could make mention in a pop song of the Venus de Milo and he and his publisher and the movie's producer could all be confident that, somewhere at the back of their minds, most listeners would have a hazy image of a statue with its arms missing.

Songs and jokes are our common currency, the most reliable guide to what it is we share. Not so long ago, a vaudevillian, reacting to a novelty song that had fallen a little flat, could chide his audience, "I see that you have Van Gogh's ear for music"; a TV variety show would include a sketch that ran: "Coming to the pub, Franz Schubert?" "Not tonight, I have to stay in and finish my symphony," etc. You can find a thousand similar references in the popular culture of sixty years ago, but not now. These aren't the deliberately obscure allusions to William Burroughs buried on 1960s concept albums, but a kind of casual cultural vocabulary that assumes that someone who digs swing bands and gangster movies can be relied upon to have a certain elementary recognition of the "classics"--great novels and old masters and classical music: the "canon" extended even unto Crosby lyrics.

True, there were those who had forgotten or never learned what the Venus de Milo or Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony was, but they tended to feel sheepish about such lapses. You rarely came across fellows like the Hispanic rapper being interviewed on TV a year or two back who claimed that he didn't want to learn 'bout no George Washington 'cuz George Washington had no relevance to him. As it happens, I'm not ill-disposed toward Hispanic rap, taking the view that rap, like opera, tends to be most agreeable in a language one doesn't understand. But someone should point out to the chap that George Washington and a few other dead white males of no relevance are the reasons that he finds it more congenial to pursue his calling as a Hispanic rapper in Los Angeles rather than Guatemala City. Still, why blame him when the Federal government itself is happy to wipe the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln off the calendar and merge them into that big nothing, Presidents' Day? Washington? He's history.

By such criteria, very little history is "relevant." Today, the word "classics" is applied not to Greek and Latin but to early Stones cuts or some newly discovered digitally remastered episodes of "The Beverly Hillbillies." In lieu of real, living history, it's possible to live in ersatz history twenty-four hours a day, tuned to finely targeted radio stations offering round-the-clock hits from, according to taste, the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, or even the late Seventies/early Eighties--part of the virtual ghettos that have risen up instead of the dreaming spires of Marshall McLuhan's promised global village.

Traditional societies appear like icebergs: beneath the surface, there's the unseen seven-eighths, the shared history on which the top eighth sits. When William Mann of the London Times became the first critic to write seriously about The Beatles, he did so by banging on about "aeolian cadences" and similar terms. He felt that, if you were going to argue the musical merits of the Fab Four, you had to submit them to the same technical analysis as you would Schubert. For his pains, John Lennon dismissed Mann as a "bullshitter." Offering an alternative explanation, Paul McCartney said, "There are always two things we do when we sit down to write a song. First we sit down. Then we write a song.".

Thirty years later, the Mann model has all but vanished. A critic or a professor--for these things are now the province of the academy--cannot (as Wilfred Mellers once did) compare The Beatles with Schubert, because he has no very clear idea of what Schubert did. Mann's successor in the Times, David Sinclair, writes of the trio Rapeman:.

Albini favors a thin, scratchy guitar sound, massively overcranked to deliver squalls of feedback ... Solos unfold like so much sonic splatter.... Albini's singing is a rabidly incoherent, hysterical shriek that brings a number of the songs to the verge of self-destruction.

In case you haven't twigged, Sinclair's giving the boys a rave. One can only admire, he decides, Rapeman's "high degree of individual musicianship," not to mention "the scalpel-sharp sense of purpose to which it is harnessed." For Mann, if The Beatles merited a place in the canon, they had to submit to the same admission criteria as Brahms or Wolf. For Mann's successors, rock criticism is arguably one of the most seminal things since the last arguably seminal thing a couple of days ago.

The London Times, like The New York Times and most other papers, has exhaustive coverage of rock music, but very little of it has to do with "aeolian cadences." The bottom seven-eighths of the iceberg has melted away and what's left bobs around on the water alluding only to itself--rock 'n' movies 'n' Calvin Klein ads 'n' junk food 'n' Clinton jokes ... Moreover, in this presenttense culture, the occasional forays down the highbrow end are even more unconvincing than Mellers and Mann were. When Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard Professor of English and Afro-American Studies, was called as an expert witness in the obscenity trial of 2 Live Crew, he cited, as an example of the respectable poetic tradition of explicit sexual imagery, "Shakespeare's 'My Love is like a red, red rose. " No reporter, even assuming he'd spotted it, was tactless enough to mention that the Professor's quoted line comes not from the Bard but Robbie Burns. But who cares? "A rose is a rose is a rose," as Gertrude Lawrence famously said. Robbie Burns? He's history.

Across the swamp of our know-nothing culture, the Harvard Professor reaches lazily out to the Hispanic rapper, wallowing in the mud like two dozey hippos. All of our ancient institutions are vulnerable in a media age: when everything is brand-new, up-to-the-minute or, at any rate, all-improved and excitingly relaunched, what's the point of anything whose authority derives from the fact that it was around before you were born? For the Royal Family, the solution was to tiptoe gingerly into the shallow end of modern celebrity: Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of York and the Prince Edward agreed to be team captains on a Royal game show; a decade later, Prince Edward is a TV producer, the Duchess does commercials for Ocean Spray cranberry juice, and the Duke spends much of his time denying he has AIDS.

For the Church of England, the solution was to try to get a bit more with-it, daddio: the Bishop of Durham, apparently a bornagain doubter, described the Resurrection as "basically a sort of conjuring trick with bones"; less elevated clergy have held "Raves for Jesus" and introduced cardboard Clap-O-Meters into their churches so that, when Our Lord's name is mentioned, we applaud vigorously and the Vicar moves the arrow round to the top category--"Pure Dead Brilliant!!" But the Church and State have made their feeble accommodations with pop culture mostly for reasons of self-doubt or strategy. Only Professor Gates and co. have chosen to go over to the other side with such gusto--hipper than thou, cooler than thou, more pure dead brilliant than thou. It's not that pop stars want to be intellectuals, but that intellectuals want to be pop stars--a uniquely contemporary crisis. The threat to the European past comes not from mass vulgarization but from elite vulgarization. The most popular forms of contemporary culture--"Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," The Bridges of Madison County, Whitney Houston and Celine Dion ballads--are unchanged in their bourgeois sentimental efficiency from their equivalents a hundred years ago. What's different is that, whereas a century ago our betters were telling us to put down our parlor ballads for Mozart and Beethoven, now they tell us we should be listening to Rapeman or Suicide.

Conservatives are fond of quoting Cicero: "To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child." But what works as a put-down in Cicero's day isn't necessarily as effective in ours: one of the reasons we're not interested in anything that happened before we were born is precisely because we want to remain ever children. That would certainly appear to be the principle on which modern society operates. Mass culture is not democratic culture: it values certain groups over others. The music industry and motion pictures devote the bulk of their product to the young; TV advertisers prefer shows that attract a young demographic, presumably because those audiences are more susceptible to the unceasing swirl of pointless and interchangeable novelties on which a presenttense culture depends; last year, The New York Times reported with dismay that according to an NEA survey on the "graying" of arts audiences, the average age of theatergoers at five Broadway shows was 40.2 years. Given that American life expectancy is in the mid-seventies and that any four-year-old kid who wants to spend his evenings at Sondheim musicals ought to be in therapy, I'd say that figure was about smack dab where it should be. In essence, the Times and the NEA are fretting that Americans are too elderly for their art forms' preferred image.

But it's also true that as big a factor in the dismal immaturity of contemporary culture is our swollen academe. America now confers annually almost five times the number of degrees it bestowed in 1950; its college population is twice the size of its high school population; by 1993, to earn a bachelor's degree took on average 6.29 years. Yet President Clinton apparently won't be satisfied until every American goes to college. Possibly he has in mind the German model, which is rapidly approaching the point at which the average able-bodied male completes his education at thirty-nine, pursues the career for which he's been so thoroughly prepared for a couple of years and then takes early retirement at forty-two.

To what disciplines are these multitudes of elderly students submitting? None, naturally. Like so much of our arts and entertainments, the principal purpose is to defer adulthood. More college students means perhaps a teensy bit more shakespeare but, sure as night follows day, or A.M. follows P.M., lots more Maya Angelou, more Rigoberta Menchu, more Afrocentrism, more Tarantino studies, women's studies, queer studies, transgender studies.... Certainly, multiculturalism doesn't extend to knowing the capital of Malaysia or the principal exports of South Africa. We have far more education at far greater cost than ever before, yet we are conspicuously less educated. If Bill Clinton seriously wishes to be remembered as the "education president," he might consider introducing a mandatory Federal school-leaving age of twelve.

In Vermont, the Supreme Court has just declared the state's funding of education unconstitutional on the grounds that one cannot have "equality of opportunity" if some towns are prepared to spend nine thousand dollars per pupil while others spend only six thousand. The system which sustained America's education for most of its history is, apparently, illegal. It seems self-evidently banal, given the money America's thrown at the public school system in recent years, to measure education by the size of the budget. A hundred years ago, we took a different view: the voters hired the teacher and boarded him out to the lowest bidder within the district; no hidden costs there. The trouble with Vermont's decision is that every movement toward statewide or Federal education systems is to the advantage of the teachers' unions and delivers the elementary schools further into the hands of the same people who've demolished the universities, people who seem determined to reduce the past to three or four ongoing grievance disputes. In some schools, they're already there. In San Francisco, you can't pray or sing hymns but every child gets to help make the banner for the Gay Pride parade.

President Clinton's answer to the woes of education is the Internet: he's committed to wiring up every classroom, whether it wants to be or not. Heaven knows why. Children don't exactly need to be encouraged to switch on their computers and other electronic toys, so it would be heartening to think that, for at least a few hours a day, they might be cajoled into opening a book. Besides, Mr. Clinton's optimism flies in the face of even recent history. Radio was supposed to be an educational tool: it started in the early Twenties with serious talks and live drama from the Provincetown Players and "The American School of the Air"; today, it's a jukebox. TV was supposed to be an educational tool: it began with Leonard Bernstein explaining symphonic construction in prime time; today, it's a freakshow. Who seriously doubts that the Internet will follow the same trajectory? Pubescent boys, up in their rooms downloading Teri Hatcher all night, have already got the measure of the thing.

As that last kindergarten class trooped out of our academy building, many of them descendants of its very first class a century and a half earlier, it was hard not to feel that this next generation is the biggest experiment of all, caught between an omnipresent commercial culture which despises the past and an intellectual establishment which seeks to annex it for its own purposes. We should cherish those small-town Memorial Day and Fourth of July celebrations where nervous third graders in stovepipe hats and false beards recite the Gettysburg Address. Unlike our president, they can still be bothered to check. The past? It's history.