“Hurt and angry, the American public has begun to ask questions of some of its educators.

Who took advantage of their good-natured, shallow, anti-intellectualism to lull them to sleep?

Who watered the stock of ideas, drained the content out of learning, cheated their children out of the pleasures of intellect, crippled them for life in the arts of words and numbers, and then seized all the positions of power and influence to impose their miserable follies on future ages?

Who threw up in front of this a Maginot Line of projects that do not accomplish anything, of surveys that do not see anything, of compulsory courses that do not teach anything, of pseudo-theses that do not prove anything, or prove only the self-evident, of books that do not mean anything,…?

And above all, what has it been done for? If it were part of an organized revolution, like Communism, one could at least understand it; but what is the point of a revolution without purpose, a subversiveness so fumbling, so witless, so well-meaning?”

H. Northrop Frye, By Liberal Things (1959), 16
Illustration: Van Howell