Education for Tomorrow, yesterday

In former times you could make some effort to teach people what they needed to know. … But today education means a radically different thing.  We have to prepare children to meet the unexpected, for their problems will not be the same as their fathers’.  To prepare them for the unexpected means to train them in method  instead of filling them with facts …

-- Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery

(Lest this seem like breaking news, note that Drift and Mastery was published in 1914.)

Our schools and colleges are overwhelmed by the growth of the population they are supposed to educate, and they are under enormous pressure -- for the most part irresistible -- to lower their intellectual standards.  There is an ominous tendency in American education to teach more and more students  less and less of the great disciplines  which form the educated man.

… With the declining level of education, with the vulgarization of the cultural standards in our mass society, we shall become a big but second-rate people:  fat, Philistine, and self-indulgent.
-- Walter Lippmann, column for February 4, 1958  (in the aftermath of the Sputnik challenge).

Note well:  What today would be code-words, had other meanings then:  1958 was well prior to the Federal enforcement of integration, and the large Hispanic in-migration; these would only reinforce his point.

Strangely prescient, too, that tossed-off epithet “fat”.   How he would gasp, to see how literally, anatomically true that has become, in much of the country !