[Ohiogift] see: Common Core Impatience

[Will Fitzhugh]

...And perhaps no other country provides a better illustration of the effects on a nation of a general and thorough shift of the greater part of its educational system from the “humanities” to the “realities” than Germany between 1840 and 1940.**


F.A. Hayek
The Road to Serfdom
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1944, p. 200


Possible we have not yet given enough attention to one feature of the intellectual development in Germany during the last hundred years which is now in an almost identical form making its appearance in the English-speaking countries: the scientists’ agitating for a “scientific” organization of society. The idea of a society organized “through and through” from the top has in Germany been considerably furthered by the quite unique influence which her scientific and technological specialists were allowed to exercise on the formation of social and political opinions. Few people remember that in the modern history of Germany the political professors have played a role comparable to that of the political lawyers in France. The influence of these scientist-politicians was of late years not often on the side of liberty: the “intolerance of reason” so frequently conspicuous in the scientific specialist, the impatience with the ways of the ordinary man so characteristic of the expert, and the contempt for anything which was not consciously organized by superior minds according to a scientific blueprint were phenomena familiar in German public life for generations before they became of significance in England. And perhaps no other country provides a better illustration of the effects on a nation of a general and thorough shift of the greater part of its educational system from the “humanities” to the “realities” than Germany between 1840 and 1940.**


**Note: “I believe it was the author of Leviathan who first suggested that the teaching of the classics should be suppressed, because it instilled a dangerous spirit of liberty!”



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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh at tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog


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