New at IWP Articles: Jacques Barzun, 1959, The Tyranny of Idealism in Education.

“Education is always inadequate, its pure purpose flawed by those who give it as well as by those who take it. But one element which belongs to it, and which we have suppressed in favor of ideal projections since Wilson and Dewey struggled with an older pedantry, is still there to be used as a tonic and a test: that element is intellectual work, the use of the mind for creating order in a man’s perceptions and thoughts about the world. Everything else, character included, is a by-product, and hence impossible to ‘give’ or even to cultivate directly.

“Nor, in the end, is this effort of intellect to know itself and its surroundings a selfish individual pursuit, though even if it were it would still be the only possible goal of higher education properly so-called. When sufficiently widespread the individual effort does not remain a private good but has a national result, as Wilson, once again, made evident: ‘America will be great among the nations only in proportion as she finds an adequate voice…. She will not be known until she is understood; …her wealth will not interpret her, or her physical power, or the breadth of her uncounted acres, or anything she has builded; but only such revealing speech as will hold the ear and command the heed of other nations and of her own people. Our thinkers must assist her to know herself.’”