Lying about the Wolf: Essays in Culture and Education

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

It is widely believed that the quality of education in Canada has gone
downhill over the last few decades. David Solway estimates that at least
half the students graduating from high school today do not possess the
scholastic equipment needed to ensure success in college or university.

This state of affairs is not simply an outcome of poor training in the
early grades, Solway maintains; rather, it is symptomatic of a broad
cultural problem in Western civilization. For almost two generations, we
have lived in a nonhistorical and iconic environment. Students have
ceased to parse not only sentences, but the temporal relations between
events. In the author’s view, it is critical that students read more
widely, because language is linked to culture and history just as our
sense of reality is bound up with time. Solway cites Heidegger’s idea
that we do not simply live in time, we “live time.”

This intriguing and provocative book is recommended not for the general
reader, but for the expert in semiotics or language theory.