The New Seriousness or the New Ignorance?

This rather overlong piece on what might be called 'the new seriousness' is vaguely heartening, though we shouldn't take the BBC's expansion of factual programming as in itself a good thing: some pretty dire stuff appears under this rubric in the terrestrial schedules (Andrew Marr's The Making Of Modern Britain anyone?). But BBC4 is certainly a Good Thing, in much the same way as Radio 4 - see the last section of Burrell's piece for the story of the soaraway success of Radio 4's excellent History of the World in 100 Objects. That truly is heartening. But where does this current wave of 'thirst for knowledge' come from? I suspect one factor in it is simply this - that schools, by and large, no longer teach stuff. The new seriousness might be a by-product of the new ignorance. Especially in the humanities, school subjects seem to be approached from every possible angle but that of building a solid backbone of fact. In particular, narrative history - perhaps the most popular form of factual TV - is conspicuously absent from the form of history taught in the classroom. Is television now effectively doing the job that always used to be done by schools - teaching people stuff? If so, it makes you wonder what(apart from its custodial and socialising functions) school is for...