We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little thi...s village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked,--goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure--if they are, indeed, so well off--to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But in a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil... is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato. But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... liberal intellectuals ... tend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping that... those in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the "establishment."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
POET If not in a place, where are the People weeping?... LIBERAL They creep weeping in the face, not place. POET Is it something with which we may cope The weeping, the creeping, the peepee-ing, the peeping?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to ...do without, and to depart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The working woman may be quick to see any problems with children as her fault because she isn't as available to them. However, the... fact that she is employed is rarely central to the conflict. And overall, studies show, being employed doesn't have negative effects on children; carefully done research consistently makes this clear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and... the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited.... It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »