Anti-Intellectualism in American Life REVIEW Part II – Business and Education Education
In a previous post, we looked at what Richard Hofstadter had to say about anti-intellectualism in American religion, politics, and business. In this post, we summarize his arguments about anti-intellectualism in American education. There is a certain irony here. How is it that the principle mechanism for socializing children into a love of truth-seeking can be commandeered and used to stifle the impulse altogether? I suspect that it is neither Hofdtadter’s nor my intent to make schools into academies of irrelevance that banish the curricula of the dollar-godded utilitarians entirely, but it is our intent to say that students should be encouraged and inspired to get interested in what interests them without having to justify the interest to their future potential employers.
So, here are some examples from the history of anti-intellectualism in American education. Hoftadter starts with a gentleman by the name of Wiilliam Manning of North Billerica, Massachusetts, who published a 1798 pamphlet decrying the public expenditure of tax money on schools. For Manning, education was nothing more than an elitist weapon of class warfare. He saw no reason why a school teacher should be paid anything more than a low-cost day laborer. Hofstadert writes:
“Here, then, is the key to Manning’s educational strategy. Education was to be made cheap for the common man; and higher education, such as there was, would be organized simply to serve elementary education to provide inexpensive instructors for the common schools. "Larning . . . aught to be promoted in the cheepest and best manner possable" in such a way, that is, that "we should soone have a plenty of school masters & misstrisejs as cheep as we could hire other labour, & Labour & Larning would be connected together & lessen the number of those that live without work."
“Advanced learning Manning considered to have no intrinsic value worth cultivating. Academies and classical studies that went beyond what was necessary "to teach our Children a b c" were "only to give imploy to gentlemens sons & make places for men to live without worke. For their is no more need for a mans haveing a knowledge of all the languages to teach a Child to read write & cifer than their is for a farmer to have the marinors art to hold plow.”
Examples throughout American history abound.
“The canons of the cult of experience required that the ambitious young man be exposed at the earliest possible moment to what one writer called ‘the discipline of daily life that comes with drudgery.’ Formal schooling, especially if prolonged, would only delay such exposure. The lumber magnate, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, concluded that the college man was ‘apt to think that because he is a college graduate he ought not be obliged to commence at the bottom of the ladder and work up, as the office boy does who enters the office when he is fourteen years of age.’”
“On two matters there was almost no disagreement: education should be more "practical"; and higher education, as least as it -was conceived in the old-time American classical college, was useless as a back ground for business. Business waged a long, and on the whole successful, campaign for vocational and trade education at the high-school level and did much to undermine the high school as a center of liberal education. The position of the Massachusetts wool manufacturer who said that he preferred workers with only a common-school education, since he considered that the more learned were only preparing themselves for Congress, and who rejected educated workmen on the ground that he could not run his mill with algebra, was in no way unusual or extreme; nor was the argument of the industrial publicist Henry Carey Baird was the founder of the first publishing firm in America specializing in technical and industrial books. "Too much education of a certain sort," he protested in 1885, “such as Greek, Latin, French, German, and especially bookkeeping, to a person of humble antecedents, is utterly demoralizing in nine cases out of ten, and is productive of an army of mean-spirited "gentlemen" -who are above what is called a "trade" and who are only content to follow some such occupation as that of standing behind a counter, and selling silks, gloves, bobbins, or laces, or to "keep books. . . . Our system of education, as furnished by law, when it goes beyond what in Pennsylvania is called a grammar school, is vicious in the extreme, productive of more evil than good. Were the power lodged with me, no boy or girl should be educated at the public expense beyond what he or she could obtain at a grammar school, except for some useful occupation. ‘The high school’ of today must, as I believe, under an enlightened system, be supplanted by the technical school, with possibly ‘shops’ connected with it. ... We are manufacturing too many ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies,’ so called, and demoralization is the result. . . . ‘Whenever I find a rich man dying and leaving a large amount of money to found a college, I say to myself, ‘It is a pity he had not died while he was poor.’"
Frederick Weyerhaeuser and Henry Carey Baird were not the only business interests that opposed an intellectual curriculum in the schools. The great industrialist, Andrew Carnegie also thought it was foolish to “leave no child behind” in schools. Though he donated money for libraries so that the meritorious could educate themselves, he apparently preferred his workers to have brains that obeyed more than they thought.
“On the classical college curriculum he [Carnegie] was unsparing. It was a thing on which men ‘wasted their precious years trying to extract education from an ignorant past whose chief province is to teach us, not what to adopt, but what to avoid.’ Men had sent their sons to colleges ‘to waste their energies upon obtaining a knowledge of such languages as Greek and Latin, which are of no more practical use to them than Choctaw’ and where they were ‘crammed with the details of petty and insignificant skirmishes between savages.’ Their education only imbued them with false ideas and gave them ‘a distaste for practical life.’ ‘Had they gone into active work during the years spent at college they would have been better educated men in every true sense of that term.’
Even founders of prestigious schools like Stanford had dim views of the intellectual life of the intellectualized eastern colleges.
“Leland Stanford was another educational philanthropist who had no faith in existing education. Of all the applicants for jobs who came to him from the East, the most helpless, he said, were college men. Asked what they could do, they would say ‘anything’ while in fact they had ‘no definite technical knowledge of anything,’ and no clear aim or purpose. He hoped that the university he endowed would overcome this by offering ‘a practical, not a theoretical education.’”
Opposition to intellectual activity for its own sake in higher education also came from the American farmer.
“As Ross points out, ‘the farmers themselves were the hardest to convince of the need and possibility of occupational training.’ When they did not resist the idea of such education, they resisted proposals that it have any university connections or any relation to experimental science. Separate farm colleges, severely utilitarian in purpose, would do. The Wisconsin Grange argued that each profession should be taught by its practitioners. ‘Ecclesiastics should teach ecclesiastics, lawyers teach lawyers, mechanics teach mechanics, and farmers teach farmers.’”
Politicians, seeking approval and votes of such farmers mimic their attitudes towards the intellectual.
“Some governors wanted to get as far away as possible from the tradition of liberal education represented by the classical colleges. The governor of Ohio wanted the instruction to be ‘plain and practical, not theoretically and artistically scientific in character’; the governor of Texas imagined that an agricultural college was ‘for the purpose of training and educating farm laborers’ The governor of Indiana thought that any kind of higher education would be a deterrent to honest labor.”
News papers often picked up the refrain.
“One paper called the agricultural colleges ‘asylums for classical idiots and political professors’ and another suggested that the necessary task was ‘to clean out the smug DJD’s and the pimply-faced Professors’ and put in their places men who have a lively sense of the lacks in learning among men and women who have to grapple daily with the world’s work in this busy age."
It is no wonder, Hofstadter notes in his day, that a President of Oklahoma University stated his desire to preside over a college that the football team could be proud of. At this point in Hofstadter’s book, he turns to anti-intellectualism in the elementary and secondary schools where this battle between “eggheads” and “fatheads” is settled. The chapter is entitled, “The School and the Teacher” and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the back-story to what is taking place in their own childrens’ schools.
The fight over whether or not tax payers wanted to fund intellectual activity began even while the fight to publically fund schools at all was just concluding. Horace Mann had to sell the idea of public education in Massachusetts by insisting that it would be good for business and the republic. In some respects, schools were to be thought advisable if they taught students not to think.
“Francis Bowen, Harvard’s professor of moral philosophy, concurred with Mann’s views; the New England school system, he said, looking backward in 1857, "had degenerated into routine, it was starved by parsimony. Any hovel would answer for a school-house, any primer would do for a text-book, any farmer s apprentice was competent to *teach school" American Journal of Education, Vol. IV (September, 1857), p. 14.
In 1870, when the country was on the eve of a great forward surge in secondary education, William Franklin Phelps, then head of a normal school in Winona, Minnesota, and later a president of the National Education Association, declared: 'They [the elementary schools] are mainly in the hands of ignorant, unskilled teachers. The children are fed upon the mere husks of knowledge. They leave school for the broad theater of life without discipline; without mental power or moral stamina. . . . Poor schools and poor teachers are in a majority throughout the country. Multitudes of the schools are so poor that it would be as well for the country if they were closed. . . . They afford the sad spectacle of ignorance engaged in the stupendous fraud of self-perpetuation at the public expense. . . . Hundreds of our American schools are little less than undisciplined juvenile mobs.”
In 1892 Joseph M. Rice toured the country to examine its school systems and reported the same depressing picture in city after city, with only a few welcome exceptions: education was a creature of ward politics; ignorant politicians hired ignorant teachers; teaching was an uninspired thing of repetitive drill. Ten years later, when the Progressive movement was barely under way, the New York Sun had a different kind of complaint:
‘When we were boys, boys had to do a little work in school. They were not coaxed; they were hammered. Spelling, writing, and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn. In these more fortunate times, elementary education has become in many places a vaudeville show. The child must be kept amused, and learns what he pleases. Many sage teachers scorn the old-fashioned rudiments, and it seems to be regarded as between a misfortune and a crime for a child to learn to read.’”
“The tradition seems to have persisted well on into the nineteenth century, when we find this sad confession: "The man who was disabled to such an extent that he could not engage in manual labor who was lame, too fat, too feeble, had the phthisic or had fits or was too lazy to work well, they usually made schoolmasters out of these, and thus got what work they could out of them."
"If a young man be moral enough to keep out of State prison, he will find no difficulty in getting approbation for a schoolmaster.”
Some years later President Joseph Caldwell of the University of North Carolina waxed indignant about the recruitment of the school teachers of his state: ‘Is a man constitutionally and habitually indolent, a burden upon all from whom he can extract support? Then there is one way of shaking him off, let us make him a schoolmaster. To teach school is, in the opinion of many, little else than sitting still and doing nothing. Has any man wasted all his property, or ended in debt by indiscretion and misconduct? The business of school-keeping stands -wide open for his reception, and here he sinks to the bottom, for want of capacity to support himself. Has any one ruined himself, and done all he could to corrupt others, by dissipation, drinking, seduction, and a course of irregularities? Nay, has he returned from prison after an ignominious atonement for some violation of the laws? He is destitute of character and can not be trusted, but presently he opens a school and the children are seen flocking into it, for if he is willing to act in that capacity, we shall all admit that as he can read and -write, and cypher to the square root, he will make an excellent schoolmaster.”
A vicious circle had been drawn. American communities had found it hard to find, train, or pay for good teachers. They settled for what they could get, and what they got was a high proportion of misfits and incompetents. They tended to conclude that teaching was a trade which attracted rascals, and, having so concluded, they were reluctant to pay the rascals more than they were worth. To be sure, there is evidence that the competent schoolteacher of good character was eagerly welcomed when he could be found, and soon earned a status in the community higher than that of his colleagues elsewhere; but it was a long time before any considerable effort could be made to improve the caliber of teachers generally.”
“Here no doubt the American educational creed itself needs further scrutiny. The belief in mass education was not founded primarily upon a passion for the development of mind, or upon pride in learning and culture for their own sakes, but rather upon the supposed political and economic benefits of education. No doubt leading scholars and educational reformers like Horace Mann did care for the intrinsic values of mind. But in trying to persuade influential men or the general public of the importance of education, they were careful in the main to point out the possible contributions of education to public order, political democracy, or economic improvement.”
“There is also some evidence that the anti-intellectualism I have already characterized in religion, politics, and business found its way into school practice. There seems to have been a prevailing concern that children should not form too high an estimate of the uses of mind.” A fifth reader of 1884 quoted Emerson’s Goodbye:
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophists’ schools, and the learned clan;
For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet.
Educational reformers were no doubt pleased with the progress that was to be made when children were required to attend school. But if their vision was to give all of the sort of education that the wealthy had typically given to their sires in the private schools of New England, they were to be sadly disappointed. Putting a hockey team on a stage will not make them ballet dancers. “Now, in an increasing measure,” writes Hofstadter,
“secondary-school pupils were not merely unselected but also unwilling; they were in high school not because they wanted further study but because the law forced them to go. The burden of obligation was shifted accordingly: whereas once the free high school offered a priceless opportunity to those who chose to take it, the high school now held a large captive audience that its administrators felt obliged to satisfy. 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." What the High Schools Ought to Teach (Washington, 1940), pp. II-IA.
Hofstadter traces the cascade of effects that resulted from requiring all children to attend more school for more years.
“As the years went by, the schools filled with a growing proportion of doubtful, reluctant, or actually hostile pupils. It is a plausible conjecture that the average level of ability, as well as interest, declined. It became clear that the old academic curriculum could no longer be administered to a high-school population of millions in the same proportion as it had been to the 359,000 pupils of 1890. So long as public education had meant, largely, schooling in the primary grades, the American conviction that everyone can and should be educated was relatively easy to put into practice. But as soon as public education included secondary education, it began to be more doubtful that everyone could be educated, and quite certain that not everyone could be educated in the same way. Beyond a doubt, change was in order.
Moreover, the schools were under pressure not merely to fulfill the laws, but to become attractive enough to hold the voluntary allegiance of as large a proportion of the young for as long as they could. Manfully settling down to their assignment, educators began to search for more and more courses which, however dubious their merits by traditional educational standards, might interest and attract the young. In time they became far less concerned with the type of mind the high school should produce or with the academic side of the curriculum. (Boys and girls who wanted to go to college would hang on in any case; it was the others they had to please.) Discussions of secondary education became more frequently inter-larded with references to a new, decisive criterion of performance ‘the holding power of the school.’
The need to accept large numbers with varying goals and capacities and to exercise for many pupils a custodial function made it necessary for the schools to introduce variety into their curricula.”
In time, a watered down intellectualist approach turned from a necessary evil to a positive good. Hoftadter explains:
“Far from conceiving the mediocre., reluctant, or incapable student as an obstacle or a special problem in a school system devoted to educating the interested, the capable., and the gifted, American educators entered upon a crusade to exalt the academically uninterested or un-gifted child into a kind of culture-hero [Think Ferris Beuller]. They were not content to say that the realities of American social life had made it necessary to compromise with the ideal of education as the development of formal learning and intellectual capacity. Instead, they militantly proclaimed that such education was archaic and futile and that the noblest end of a truly democratic system of education was to meet the child’s immediate interests by offering him a series of immediate utilities. The history of this crusade, which culminated in the ill-fated life-adjustment movement of the 1940’s and 1950’s, demands our attention; for it illustrates in action certain widespread attitudes toward childhood and schooling, character and ambition, and the place of intellect in life.”
“The balance was tipping,” Hoftadter informs,
“The high schools were no longer to be expected to suit the colleges; instead, the colleges ought to try to resemble or accommodate the high schools.”
“In 1911, a new committee of the N.E.A., the Committee of Nine on the Articulation of High School and College, submitted another report, which shows that a revolution in educational thought was well on its way. The change in personnel was itself revealing. Gone were the eminent college presidents and distinguished professors of the 1893 report; gone, too, were the headmasters of elite secondary schools. The chairman of the Committee of Nine was a teacher at the Manual Training High School of Brooklyn, and no authority on any basic academic subject matter was on his committee, which consisted of school super intendents, commissioners, and principals, together with one professor of education and one dean of college faculties. Whereas the Committee of Ten had been a group of university men attempting to design curricula for the secondary schools, the new Committee of Nine was a group of men from public secondary schools, putting pressure through the N.E.A. on the colleges: ‘The requirement of four years of work in any particular subject, as a condition of admission to a higher institution, unless that subject be one that may properly be required of all high-school students, is illogical and should, in the judgment of this committee, be immediately discontinued.’"
“The task of the high school, the Committee of Nine argued,’was to lay the foundations of good citizenship and to help in the wise choice of a vocation,’ but it should also develop unique and special individual gifts, which was ‘quite as important as the development of the common elements of culture.’ The schools were urged to exploit the dominant interests ‘that each boy and girl has at the time.’ The committee questioned the notion that liberal education should precede the vocational: ‘An organic conception of education demands the early introduction of training for individual usefulness, thereby blending the liberal and the vocational. . . .’ It urged much greater attention to the role of mechanic arts, agriculture, and ‘household science’ as rational elements in the education of all boys and girls. Because of the traditional conception of college preparation, the public high schools were responsible for leading tens of thousands of boys and girls away from the pursuits for which they are adapted and in which they are needed, to other pursuits for which they are not adapted and in which they are not needed. By means of exclusively bookish curricula false ideals of culture are developed. A chasm is created between the producers of material wealth and the distributors and consumers thereof. By 1918 the ‘liberation’ of secondary education from college ideals and university control seems to have been consummated., at least on the level of theory, even if not yet in the nation’s high-school curricula.”
“In that year the N.E.A/s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education formulated the goals of American schools in a document about which Professor Edgar B. Wesley has remarked that ‘probably no publication in the history of education ever surpassed this little five cent thirty-two page booklet in importance.’ A This statement, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, was given a kind of official endorsement by the United States Bureau of Education, which printed and distributed an edition of 130,000 copies.”
Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education made an anti-intellectual approach to education official policy. It insisted that
“the high school placed too much emphasis on intensive pursuit of most subjects. Studies should be reorganized so that a single year of work in a subject would be ‘of definite value to those who go no further.’ This would make the courses ‘better adapted to the needs both of those who continue and of those who drop out of school.’”
Insult followed injury. The report called on colleges to stop bullying high schools to teach subjects at levels that were too difficult for the common student.
“The commission further argued that the colleges and universities should follow the example of the secondary schools in considering themselves obliged to become mass institutions and to arrange their offerings accordingly. ‘The conception that higher education should be limited to the few is destined to disappear in the interests of democracy,’ it said prophetically. This meant, among other things, that high-school graduates should be able to go on to college not only with liberal but with vocational interests, and that, once in college, they should still be able to take whatever form of education they can which affords ‘profit to themselves and to society.’ In order to accommodate larger numbers, colleges and universities should supplant academic studies to some degree with advanced vocational education.”
“The commission quite reasonably urged that the high-school curriculum should be differentiated to offer a wide range of alternatives” says Hofstadter,
“but its way of expressing this objective was revealing: “The basis of differentiation should be, in the broad sense of the term, vocational, thus justifying the names commonly given, such as agricultural, business, clerical, industrial, fine-arts, and house hold-arts curriculums. Provision should be made also for those having distinctively academic interests and needs.”
“Increasingly, the mental world of the professional educationist became separated from that of the academic scholar,” the author explains.
“It is hard for an amateur, and perhaps even a professional in education, to know how much of this was justified. But two things it does seem possible to assert: first, that curricular change after 1910 was little short of revolutionary; and second, that by the 1940’s and 1950’s, the demands of the life-adjustment educators for the destruction of the academic curriculum had become practically insatiable.”
“The old academic curriculum, as endorsed by the Committee of Ten, reached its apogee around 1910. In that year more pupils were studying foreign languages or mathematics or science or English - any one of these than all non-academic subjects combined. During the following forty-year span the academic subjects offered in the high-school curricula fell from about three fourths to about one fifth. Latin, taken in 1910 by 49 per cent of public high-school pupils in grades 9 to 12, fell by 1949 to 7.8 per cent. All modern-language enrollments fell from 84.1 per cent to 22 per cent. Algebra fell from 56.9 per cent to 26.8 per cent, and geometry from 30.9 per cent to 12.8 per cent; total mathematics enrollments from 89.7 per cent to 55 per cent. Total science enrollments, if one omits a new catch-all course entitled ‘general science’ fell from 81.7 per cent to 33.3 per cent; or to 54.1 per cent if general science is included. English, though it almost held its own in purely quantitative terms, was much diluted in many school systems.”
“When the Committee of Ten examined the high-school curricula in 1893, it found that forty subjects were taught, but six of these thirteen were offered in very few schools, the basic curriculum was founded on twenty-seven subjects. By 1941 no less than 274 subjects were offered, and only 59 of these could be classified as academic studies. What is perhaps most extraordinary is not this ten-fold multiplication of subjects, nor the fact that academic studies had fallen to about one fifth the number, but the response of educational theorists: they were convinced that academic studies were still cramping secondary education. In the life-adjustment movement, which flourished in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s with the encouragement of the United States Office of Education, there occurred an effort to mobilize the public secondary-school energies of the country to gear the educational system more closely to the needs of children who - were held to be in some sense uneducable.”
“Accordingly, life-adjustment educators soon became convinced that their high educational ideals should be applied not merely to the neglected sixty per cent: what was good for them would be good for all American youth, however gifted. They were designing, as the authors of one life-adjustment pamphlet quite candidly admitted, nothing less than ‘a blueprint for a Utopian Secondary School’ a school which, they added, ‘could be operated only by teachers of rare genius.’ As I. L. Kandel has sardonically remarked, the conviction of life adjustment was ‘that what is good for sixty per cent of the pupils attending high schools, and, according to reports, deriving no benefit from this plan, is also good for all pupils.’ These crusaders had thus succeeded in standing on its head the assumption of universality once made by exponents of the classical curriculum. Formerly, it had been held that a liberal academic education was good for all pupils. Now it was argued that all pupils should in large measure get the kind of training originally conceived for the slow learner. American utility and American democracy ‘would now be realized in the education of all youth.’ The life-adjustment movement would establish once and for all the idea that the slow learner is ‘in no sense’ the inferior of the gifted, and the principle that all curricular subjects, like all children, are equal. ‘There is no aristocracy of subjects,’ said the Educational Policies Commission of the N.E.A. in 1952, describing the ideal rural school. ‘Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and home-making are all peers.’”
Education for All American Youth, A "Further Look (Washington, 1952), p. 140.
Consider the evidence Hofstadter was presenting in 1962:
“Witness the case of the course in "Home and Family Living" required repetitively in one New York State community in all grades from seven to ten. Among the topics covered were: "Developing school spirit," "My duties as a baby sitter," "Clicking with the crowd," "How to be liked," "What can be done about acne?" "Learning to care for my bedroom," "Making my room more attractive." Eighth-grade pupils were given these questions on a true-false test: "Just girls need to use deodorants." "Cake soap can be used for shampooing."
The end result is actually somewhat shocking.
“In the name of utility, democracy, and science, many educators had come to embrace the supposedly uneducable or less educable child as the center of the secondary-school universe, relegating the talented child to the sidelines. One group of educationists, looking forward to the day when ‘the aristocratic, cultural tradition of education [will be] completely and finally abandoned’ had this to say of pupils who showed unusual intellectual curiosity: ‘Any help we can give them should be theirs, but such favored people learn directly from their surroundings. Our efforts to teach them are quite incidental in their development. It is therefore unnecessary and futile for the schools to, attempt to gear their programs to the needs of unusual people.’ In this atmosphere, as Jerome Bruner puts it, ‘the top quarter of public school students, from which we must draw intellectual leadership in the next generation, is perhaps the group most neglected by our schools in the recent past.’"
“Possibly I exaggerate” says Hofstadter, “but otherwise it is hard to understand how an official of the Office of Education could have written this insensitive passage.”
“A considerable number of children, estimated at about four million, deviate sufficiently from mental, physical, and behavioral norms to require special educational provision. Among them are the blind and the partially seeing, the deaf and the hard of hearing, the speech-defective, the crippled, the delicate, the epileptic, the mentally deficient, the socially maladjusted, and the extraordinarily gifted.”
Hodstadter writes in the footnote to the above passage:
"Lloyd E. Blanch, Assistant Commissioner for Higher Education, United States Office of Education, writing in Mary Irwin 9 ed.: American Universities and Colleges, published by the American Council on Education (Washington, 1956), p- 8; italics added. It has been pointed out that the author was, after all, proposing special programs for the gifted, among others, but this consideration does not seem to me to mitigate the implications of this bizarre list of categories.”
In many respects it makes sense that a school needs to “fit” the children educated in it. But to assert that the child who wishes to pursue the development of a non-vocational intellect is a freak and a nuisance, is a painful irony for many. Imagine what it is like for an intellectually oriented child to attend school in a place where the principle proudly states:
“For this world it is deemed important that the pupil learn, not chemistry, but the testing of detergents; not physics, but how to drive and service a car; not history, but the operation of the local gas works; not biology, but the way to the zoo; not Shakespeare or Dickens, but how to write a business letter.”
Hofstadter concludes his book with a lengthy discussion of the philosophical approach of John Dewey. As interesting as it was to me, it tended to add words to an argument that I think was already finished and so I will leave it for some future post.
In conclusion, as I was reading, I began to wonder, “Why should there be an ‘anti-intellectual’ movement? Why should it bother someone practical that someone is out there spending their days learning “useless” impractical things? I suspect that it has something to do with the egalitarian values of a democracy that believes that no person should have more power or wealth than another. Maybe there is simply a notion that there is something pretentious and aristocratic about a small group of people looking down from the heights of their broader view of the world, thinking those below them as knowledge-peasants? As Hofstadter expresses it,
“Something was missing in the dialectic of American populistic democracy. Its exponents meant to diminish, if possible to get rid of, status differences in American life, to subordinate educated as well as propertied leadership.”
Maybe just as there is building resentment for the “one-percenters” who control most of the money, there is something that is considered un-American about owning more than a fair share of understanding. Never-mind that the question that led to it was long-orphaned by the majority.
Question for Comment: Do you think different kids need different schools? Or do we simply need schools that are better at meeting the needs of different kids?
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