Nodding in NOLA

“ Ha! Funny how Mencken’s exhortation for an increased commitment is so so easily construed as a rallying cry for the opposite. The saddest part is that even with the bar set so low, we’ve failed to provide all of our young with a chance to be reduced to boring security of the middle-class. That means, I suppose, the only thing to do is to stop feeling was must be a misguided twinge of guilt. Apparently, being an extra in the tableau of low-grade, human misery that throws the coddled and commodified lives of penny ante intellectuals into stark relief and provides the striking textures and tones of city life that urban creatives crave is much preferable to being a mediocre student that transitions into a intellectually-underwhelming job and goes home to a too-comfortably plump wife whose mouth has set in a permanently tight line since reductions in the household budget delayed the bathroom remodeling. America is dead. Long live America. ” -

That erroneous assumption is to the effort that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

H. L. Mencken, The American Mercury, April, 1924 (via jakelodwick)