Mises Wire

The Theory of Education in the United States

rotunda
  1. Introduction: Education vs Training
  2. Dissatisfaction with American “Education”
  3. Tinkering with the Mechanics of Education
  4. The Educational Theory of Equality and Democracy
  5. The Literate Citizen
  6. Classical Education
  7. Training, Diluted Science, and Big Numbers
  1. Drugstore Education
  2. The Great Tradition
  3. Sound Theory and a Reasonable Precision in Nomenclature
  4. But What of the Educable?
  5. Gresham’s Law
  6. Vested Interest in Bad Theory
  7. Conclusion and Reassurance

Albert Jay Nock’s classic lectures on education:

The Great Tradition will go on because the forces of nature are on its side; it has on its side an invincible ally, the self-preserving instinct of humanity. Men may forsake it, but they will come back to it because they must; their collective existence cannot permanently go on without it.

Whole societies may disallow it and set it at nought, as ours has done; they may try to live by ways of their own, by bread alone, by bread and buncombe, by riches and power, by economic exploitation, by intensive industrialism, quantity-production, by what you please; but in the end they will find, as so many societies have already found, that they must return and seek the regenerative power of the Great Tradition, or lapse into decay and death. FULL ARTICLE

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