Nut Meg’s Reviews > Anti-Intellectualism in American Life > Status Update

"The characteristic intellectual failure of the critic of power is a lack of understanding of the limitations under which power is exercised. 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."

"As soon as the inherited notion of learning as a leisure-class activity is discarded, the style of education it represented also falls under question...Academic and scholastic, instead of being titles of honor, are becoming terms of reproach."

95 pages to go, let's see if I can do it by midnight

"Until 1830, most teachers had been men...opponents of women teachers were still to be heard in many communities, but they were often easily silenced when it was pointed out that women teachers could be paid one third or one half as much as men."

"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."

"There is a type of alienation which is simply personal, which arises from the education and in some cases the personal culture of the expert. He is out of place. He is not the right kind of man, he would not be sought after as a companion if his services weren't needed."

"Whereas business had been an instrument of religious discipline, one of the various means of serving God, religious discipline now became an instrument in business, a way of using God to a worldly end."

"Business interests which suffered from Progressive policies-- and indeed many which suffered from nothing more than fear of further extension of regulation-- became convinced that the university...must be counted among their enemies"

"Furious menaces and bellowing exaggeration take the place of calm and dignified debate...Congress attains the unenviable fame of being the most helpless, disorderly, and inefficient legislative body which can be found in the civilized world." Lol some things never change

"It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals; for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat."