The Crunch

The thesis which I venture to submit to you is as follows: That during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum of studies the western culture which produced the modern democratic state; That the schools and colleges have, therefore, been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live; That, deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds and spirits, the ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values, or the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of western civilization; That the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy western civilization, and is in fact destroying it; That our civilization cannot effectively be maintained where it still flourishes, or be restored where it has been crushed, without of the revival of the central, continuous, and perennial culture of the western world; And that, therefore, what is now required in the modern educational system is not the expansion of its facilities or the specific reform of its curriculum and administration, but a thorough reconsideration of its underlying assumptions and of its purposes. I realize quite well that this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education. But I believe that the indictment is justified, and that there is a prima facie case for entertaining this indictment.[p.1 →]

—Walter Lippmann, speaking before the Association for the Advancement of Science, December 29, 1940