Laudator Temporis Acti

Grant Showerman (1870-1935), With the Professor (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910), pp. 84-85:

Could it be, after all, that his faith had been misplaced—that the value of education was overestimated, and greatly so? He remembered having read the assertion of an English observer to the effect that education was the great national fetich of the United States. He thought of the motley crowd in his own and other institutions with which he was acquainted—of the thousands of aimless young men and women floating along in the current of the college course simply because report had it that education was a good thing; of the thousands more who worked hard first to gain entrance and then to remain, and whose case was hopeless because of natural dullness and deficiency; of the throngs—some stupid and some talented—who were unambitious; of the idlers who came to get culture through being in the college atmosphere, and whose joys and sorrows were almost all inseparably connected with fraternity and sorority life.