ABSTRACT
In education, as in most facets of present-day life, it is the best of times and the worst of times. We may infer that it is the worst of times from the multitude of jeremiads on the topic as well as from our common experience as teachers. Among students there is a perceptible decline of the privately nourished passion for deep and difficult reading; among parents, an anxious preference for career preparation over liberal learning; among officials, an unexamined rage for quantifiable results; among executives, an appetite for bending education toward the training of a workforce.
