Laudator Temporis Acti

J. Enoch Powell (1912-1998), speech to the Working Men's College in St. Pancras (December 14, 1963):

The silliest and the most sinful of the many heresies of pseudo-democracy is to pretend that all studies and all learning are 'created equal'. They are not. It matters just as much to a person's education what he learns and is taught as it matters to his salvation what he believes. True education does not consist in being taught just anything, any more than true religion consists in believing just anything.

This, like most truths, is 'a hard saying'. It does not indeed oblige us to assert that in 1963, unlike 1300, theology is education and all else vanity. It does not even oblige us to assert that nothing but classics, or philosophy, or mathematics, or PPE is education. It does prevent us from assuming that students are being educated because they are at a university, irrespective of what their studies are. It does prevent us from daring to say that a subject becomes part of education because you teach it at a school, or at a CAT or in a university.

There are two aspects to education: one is the content, the subject matter itself; the other is the manner in which, and the purpose with which it is studied. 'All men,' said Aristotle, 'by nature desire to know.' The pursuit of truth, the effort to comprehend, arrange, interpret some aspect or other of the universe we perceive is an activity of humanity which justifies, rewards and motivates itself. The study of something for its own sake, for the sake of knowing, understanding, grasping it and for nothing else, is an essential characteristic of education, lower or higher, though more obviously of higher education.

PPE = Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
CAT = College of Advanced Technology

Harold Bloom, quoted in Ken Shulman, "Bloom and Doom," Newsweek, Vol. 124, No. 15 (October 10, 1994) 75:

At NYU I am surrounded by professors of hip-hop. At Yale, I am surrounded by professors far more interested in various articles on the compost heap of so-called popular culture than in Proust or Shakespeare or Tolstoy.