Peter Mullen applauds a book which accurately describes what has gone wrong with Western societies.

THE French writer Montaigne said that a philosopher should "tend his cabbages". Roger Scruton does more than that: he rides to hounds and looks after his farm in Wiltshire yet still finds time to be a research professor in Arlington, Virginia. He has never been the sort of philosopher content to remain in the ivory tower. He worked undercover in factories and private houses behind the Iron Curtain, encouraging young Czech and Romanian workers to resist and finally overthrow the Communist regime and its secret police.

I have a vivid recollection of him when he came to York University in 1985 to address the students on the subject of free speech. Because of his conservative views, the student rabble wouldn't give him a hearing and kept up a barrage of shouts, jeers and table hammering throughout the attempted lecture. They were vicious and menacing and I feared Scruton might even come to physical harm at the hands of this lumpen intelligentsia. Ironic that he had come to talk about "free speech".

He has written lucidly, beautifully on philosophy, music and literature and he is also a novelist. In this new book he describes what has gone wrong with Western societies and ends with what he sees as some signs of hope for our recovery.

His theme is knowledge and the importance of knowledge. Culture is not the property of sniffy, highbrow types.

Scruton says: "Culture is a sword wielded in the defence of the common man and his values by our guardian angel - knowledge."

The early socialists, the Workers Educational Association and the Fabian Society understood this very well and so provided high learning for working people in evening institutes and correspondence courses. Why does the Left today set its face against high learning as "elitist"? By so doing, they deprive working people of the only route to better themselves.

Dumbed down schools and universities which offer courses in golf studies and cosmetics actually deprive young people of the true knowledge that alone can free them to live life to the full by showing them the best that our civilisation has produced in the way of art and learning. To offer them trash when they could be offered the best is not an act of kindness, it is an act of cruel condescension and deprivation.

He accurately describes what has gone wrong in our schools: "By 'relevant' is invariably meant 'relevant to the interests of the kids themselves'. From this superstition have arisen all the recipes for failure that have dominated our educational systems: the proliferation of ephemeral subjects, the avoidance of difficulties, methods of teaching that strive to maintain interest at all costs - even at the cost of knowledge."

He claims to detect signs that we are at last beginning to see the error of this path and to return in our schools and universities to the traditional practice of giving students what can really nourish them for life.

The motto of this stimulating and hopeful book might be Knowledge Makes You Free.