Laudator Temporis Acti

H.L. Mencken, "The Rewards of Virtue," Chicago Tribune (October 10, 1926):

I know, like most men of my trade and interests, something about college professors, but, rather unusually, I also know something about bricklayers. My belief is that the latter are far more useful than the former, and that, taking one with another, they are also far more amiable and amusing fellows.

The pedagogue, being excessively literate, has long poisoned the world with highfalutin tosh about his high dignity and consequence, and especially about his altruism. He is commonly regarded, even by those who ought to know better, as a hero who has made vast sacrifices for the good of the rising generation and the honor of learning. He is, in fact, seldom anything of the sort. He is simply a lazybones who has taken to the birch in order to escape implements of a greater laboriousness. The rising generation is not his pet, but simply his oyster. And he has no more respect for learning, in his average incarnation, than a congressman has for statecraft or a Prohibition agent or lawyer for law.

The world’s stock of knowledge is seldom augmented by pedagogues; far more often they oppose its increase in a violent and implacable manner.