Carnegie on the School Ethic

Carnegie on the School Ethic, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty:

Carnegie on education:

 Men have wasted their precious years, trying to extract education from an ignorant past whose chief province is to teach us, not what to adopt, but what to avoid.� Men have sent their sons to colleges to waste their energies upon obtaining a knowledge of such languages as Greek and Latin, which are of no more practical use to them than Choctaw... They have been crammed with the details of petty and insignificant skirmishes between savages, and taught to exalt a band of ruffians into heroes; and we have called them "educated."� They have been "educated" as if they were destined for life upon some other planet than this... What they have obtained has served to imbue them with false ideas and to give them a distaste for practical life... Had they gone into active work during the years spent at college they would have been better educated men in every true sense of that term.� The fire and energy have been stamped out of them, and how to so manage as to live a life of idleness and not a life of usefulness has become the chief question with them.