Philosophy of Education, Ulich

Another prominent Harvard professor, Robert Ulich, wrote in his own book, Philosophy of Education (1961): "[We are producing] more and more people who will be unhappy in themselves and dissatisfied with their vocations, because the artificially prolonged time of formal schooling will arouse in them hopes which society cannot fulfil [...] These men and women will form the avant-garde of the disgruntled [...] It is no exaggeration to say that [people like these] were partly responsible for World War II."[p.202] Although Ulich is parroting Toynbee here, whose Study of History was a standard reference of speculative history for decades, the idea that serious intellectual schooling of a universal nature would be a sword pointed at the established order, has been an idea common in the West since at least the Tudors, and one openly discussed from 1890 onwards.