Quote of the Day
11 September 2006 at 9:34 am Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
As a regular feature at O&M we will begin sharing our favorite quotations, particularly on days when we have nothing original to say. Today, as a professional educator and amateur cynic, I offer this classic passage from H.L Mencken, describing the condition of American universities, circa 1928:
[T]he great majority of American colleges are so incompetent and vicious that, in any really civilized country, they would be closed by the police. . . . In the typical American state they are staffed by quacks and hag-ridden by fanatics. Everywhere they tend to become, not centers of enlightenment, but simply reservoirs of idiocy. Not one professional pedagogue out of twenty is a man of any genuine intelligence. The profession mainly attracts, not young men of quick minds and force of character, but flabby, feeble fellows who yearn for easy jobs. The childish mumbo-jumbo that passes for technique among them scarcely goes beyond the capacities of a moron. To take a Ph.D. in education, at most American seminaries, is an enterprise that requires no more real acumen or information than taking a degree in window dressing. . . . Their programs of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane. — H.L. Mencken, “The War Upon Intelligence,” Baltimore Evening Sun, December 31, 1928.
I leave it to the reader to assess how much things have changed.
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Nicolai Foss | 12 September 2006 at 3:56 am
Keynes characterized higher education as the “inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.”