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As an educational committee of the American Youth Commission wrote in 1940: “Even where a pupil is of low ability it is to be remembered that his attendance at secondary school is due to causes which are not of his making, and proper provision for him is a right which he is justified in claiming from society.”
a due respect for the principles of child development demanded that the ideal of “mastery” be dropped, and that youth should be free to test and sample and select among subjects, deriving from some what they could retain and use,
“The conception that higher education should be limited to the few is destined to disappear in the interests of democracy,” it said prophetically.
all states had adopted compulsory education laws—Mississippi, in 1918, being the last to straggle into line.
By 1911, for example, 57.5 per cent of the children in the public schools of thirty-seven of the largest cities were of foreign-born parentage.
The American mind seems extremely vulnerable to the belief that any alleged knowledge which can be expressed in figures is in fact as final and exact as the figures in which it is expressed.
“democracy” entertained by these educators somehow made it possible for them to assert that immature, insecure, nervous, retarded slow learners from poor cultural environments were “in no sense inferior” to more mature, secure, confident, gifted children from better cultural environments.
“It was inevitable that any theory which justified or rationalized the loosening of standards should be received with favor,”
An attempt to take account of the limitations and the misuse of these ideas should not be read as a blanket condemnation of progressive education,
partly because many “conservative” schools have borrowed discriminatingly from progressive innovations, we may easily forget how dismal and self-satisfied the older conservative pedagogy often was,
He has been praised, paraphrased, repeated, discussed, apotheosized, even on occasions read.
His style is suggestive of the cannonading of distant armies: one concludes that something portentous is going on at a remote and inaccessible distance, but one cannot determine just what it is.
growth is intrinsically a biological metaphor and an individualistic conception, the effect of this idea was of necessity to turn the mind away from the social to the personal function of education;
effective beginnings were made at mobilizing the child’s interests for learning, but often these interests simply displaced learning.
One can truly say of this society that by about the middle of the nineteenth century even those who belonged did not altogether belong.
The most eloquent tradition of moral protest in America is the creation of a few uncompromising sons of the patrician gentry.
Anti-intellectualism, as I hope these pages have made clear, is founded in the democratic institutions and the egalitarian sentiments of this country.
Intellectuals in the twentieth century have thus found themselves engaged in incompatible efforts: they have tried to be good and believing citizens of a democratic society and at the same time to resist the vulgarization of culture which that society constantly produces.
One reason for the fascination of so many intellectuals with mass culture—quite aside from the intrinsic gravity of the problem—is that they have found in it a legitimate (that is, non-political) way of expressing their estrangement from democratic society.
They spoke for a generation which was to think of American justice as represented by the Sacco-Vanzetti case, American regard for science by the Scopes trial, American tolerance by the Klan, the American amenities by Prohibition, American respect for law by the metropolitan gangsters, and the most profound spiritual commitment of the country by the stock-market craze.
It appears, then, to be the fate of intellectuals either to berate their exclusion from wealth, success, and reputation, or to be seized by guilt when they overcome this exclusion.
they have begun to condemn it in language that partakes both of the natural cruelty of the young and of the artificial puritanism of the political left.
The most forthright case for a really solid kind of estrangement was made a few years ago by Mailer in a famous piece in Dissent entitled “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”
The truly creative mind is hardly ever so much alone as when it is trying to be sociable.
Very often power lacks respect for that disinterestedness which is essential to the proper functioning of the expert
His characteristic moral failure lies in an excessive concern with his own purity; but purity of a sort is easily had where responsibilities are not assumed.
