I don’t have much time for my old
school, St Ignatius College Adelaide, but I’ve got to give it one
thing. Its standards had obviously improved in the seven years between
Brendan Nelson’s departure and my arrival. The Education Minister is a
know-nothing.

“A silhouetted image of Simpson, accompanied by
nine ‘values for Australian schooling’, appears on a poster that
schools must display prominently to receive a share of $33 billion in
federal funding,” The Age reported last Friday. An image of Simpson and a quote from novelist George Eliot.

We did Simpson on Friday. Now for Eliot. A few salient points:

Eliot
estranged her family with her views on religion. At Cambridge
University in 1873 she pronounced on God, Immortality and Duty, “how
inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet
how peremptory and absolute the third.”

As a young woman, Eliot
lived in an intimate relationship with a publisher, his wife and
another mistress. But her later liaison with another married man
created greater scandal. George Lewes and his lawful wife believed in
“free love” and had an open marriage – with several children by another
man. While his wife was mentally ill, Lewes ran away with George Eliot
and they lived together unmarried for more than thirty years until
Lewes’ death.

Then, aged 60, Eliot married an American banker
twenty years her younger. Their marriage was brief – she died a few
months later. In her will she had asked to be buried in Westminster
Abbey, but the Dean declined her wish.

“Character is destiny,” Nelson’s values poster quote Eliot as saying. Whoops!

We’d suggest Dr Brendan or one of his minions has a peep at Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals
before the next print run goes out. It dishes the dirt on most western
thinkers of the last couple of hundred years from a conveniently
conservative perspective. Check before you quote, Brendan.