Never was our [education] system so inadequate as today in teaching discrimination and absolutes of conduct. We teach a child to read and are surprised at the enormous circulation of the Yellow Press and the Father Coughlins. We are bred as little evolutionary Progressives, but we don’t discriminate in what direction we breathlessly rush “forward.” The explanation is that we are no longer given the standards for discriminating. Fertile soil for freedom and for mutual tolerance is never in human nature to start with, but must be painstakingly ploughed over for centuries. The history of mass movements affords vastly more evidence for original sin than for any natural goodness of man. Education’s job is austerely to restrict, not fulfill, the child’s “glorious self-expression.”
