Don’t think I’m anti-progress. That’s not what I’m advocating at all. I’m arguing for an educational system that values the past equally with the present and the future. Nostalgia certainly isn’t the way to go. It’s a dead-end, idealised, two-dimensional reality. Everything old is not necessarily good. However, everything new isn’t bad either. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater presents a problem eventually.

I was reading this article by Charles Leadbeater in the Financial Times on the (ab)uses of nostalgia by the media, advertising, the populace itself, and the state. I was agreeing with most of it and getting all excited until I realised at the end why it all seemed so familiar: I wrote a thesis like this. In fact, the very title Up the Down Escalator sounds so darned familiar I’d almost swear I read it as research, except it was just released.

Leadbeater’s previous book, though, is called Living on Thin Air, which examines how to balance a society skewed:

Individually and collectively we are all trading on ideas, creativity and judgement to make a living. Put it another way, this is the thin air business and these are the thin air commodities. The difference is that we’re now promoting a new type of brand: ourselves. “Knowledge,” states Charles Leadbeater in Living on Thin Air “is our most precious resource: we should organise society to maximise its creation and use. Our aim should be to harness the power of markets and community to the more fundamental goal of creating and spreading knowledge.” Big ideas, but for the truly knowledge-driven society, the prize, he says, is “radical and emancipatory.”

[…] Ultimately, Living on Thin Air is concerned with the task of channelling the tensions and energy between the major forces in society towards a new era of harmonious collaboration: “a society devoted to financial capitalism will be unbalanced and soulless. A society devoted to social solidarity will stagnate, lacking the dynamism of radical new ideas and the discipline of the competitive market. A society devoted totally to knowledge creation would be intelligent but poor. When these three forces of the new economy work together, they can be hugely dynamic,” he concludes. It makes a provocative manifesto. (Or so sayeth the Amazon.co.uk review.)

I’m now very curious to read what else he has to say, and how he says it.