Explanation of point one...
According to the University of Chicago, from a purely literary standpoint, the nineteenth century began in 1775 (The coming of the American Revolution?) and ended in 1910 (wracking my brain on that one...their dates for the long eighteenth coincide with the founding of the Royal Society and the first attempt to pass the Reform Bill).
I would argue the nineteenth century began in February 1764 and ended in August 1914.
February 1764 marked, again in a literature-based context, what the Enlightenment and the growing class readers had been leading up to: the mingling of the artistic and the socially and politically powerful. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the era's most esteemed painter, founded The Literary Club as an ongoing place for friends to gather, dine, and converse, with his best friend Samuel Johnson and their cohort Edmund Burke. The membership would include Joseph Banks, James Boswell (of course), John Dunning, Charles Fox, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir William Jones, Edmond Malone, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (the original Al Franken, a comic writer turned politico), Adam Smith, and Henry Temple, the senior Lord Palmerston.
Imagine the implications of such a pantheon joining together in mutual regard and intellectual trading. Here were the shapers of society and ideology, despite some differences of public opinion, sharing their ideas and holding forth as equals. Writers, painters, playwrights, and pure scholars had advanced so highly as to be able to have a say in how the world could be. The arts now touched the other realms of control, and this seemed to demand a responsibility, nbut really I see it as the genesis point for a creative horizon only some might have guessed at before (Shakespeare above all), that the artist had a duty to conjure the original, the never-before-seen, and to use this originality in the service of their ideas...for it is human nature to at least temporarily embrace the novel, to be entranced by what has never come before, and so, what better way to convey philosophies and hopes and dreams for the future? Even those in the corridors of Parliament recognized this!
From the Literary Club onward, this movement of mixing art, the great sphere of private invention, and the public world grew and grew to an apex where one of the most powerful people in the world, Benjamin Disraeli, wrote novels. There is the agitation of Charles Dickens, the radical leadership of William Morris, and the two playwrights who used their work to challenge ideas and suggest new agendas, Oscar Wilde (to a smaller degree) and George Bernard Shaw (above all).
But by the 1890's, the natural result of this momentum was a growing, equally extraordinary segment of the artistic class who recognized that the political sphere did not share their ideals...this is unsurprising, since the artist can always bring possibilities to life while the politician is mired in complex reality, but I can understand and share empathy for those who depicted the entire spectrum of life in their writing and saw only the conventional, majority-approved views on sex, religion, war, and morality rule the day. A new literary club emerged, the Bloomsbury Group, where Virginia Woolf delved deep into a human soul suddenly as infinite and full of potential as the universe itself, and Lytton Strachey turned his pen towards a hilarious but heartbreaking exploration of letting excessive ideology take command.
Then the Guns of August were fired in 1914, and art had less reason than ever to trust a social world where a select few could cause death and destruction on scales never imagined before. I am an optimist, but this was the end of one particularly glorious dream.
As to the second point...
When the public schools have come to where we are spending the most precious financial resources we have to pay people NOT to teach and carry their grievances through the bureaucracy, we have lost our way as an educated nation.
Kal told me back in November that if Obama could only reform the schools, he would have satisfied such a number of the youth who galavanized for him that he would be considered a success no matter what. Time is running out fast...
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