Editing T. S. Eliot’s Conception of Culture (section)

==== Transmission of Culture ====
While education is indeed the vehicle for the transmission of culture, Eliot wonders whether education alone can ensure it — as neither can education be limited to what can be taught, nor can everything worth preserving be taught in the first place. A discussion of the role of language naturally ensues.<blockquote>“..for the transmission of culture — a peculiar way of thinking, feeling, and behaving — and for its maintenance, there is no safeguard more reliable than a language. And to survive for this purpose it must continue to be a literary language – not necessarily a scientific language but certainly a poetic one: otherwise the spread of education will extinguish it.”</blockquote>A chord of poignance strikes, particularly close to home in light of the slow and excruciating death that Indian regional languages are inevitably spiralling into, when he goes on to say, “the literature written in that language will not, of course, make any direct impact upon the world at large; but if it is no longer cultivated, the people to whom it belongs will tend to lose their racial character.”