In our traditional system of higher learning, education was conceived as passing along the cardinal principles and values of civilization, but our modern assumption today is that we have no values worth passing on. When we take freedom to mean nothing more than the absence of external control, we are paving the way for the most dangerous anarchy imaginable. Meaningful freedom involves the presence of internal restraint and sound judgment. Without these restraints and that capacity for judgment, we open the door to mass action in virtually every area of our society. This is not the achievement of freedom, it is a return to barbarism.
Students are quick to identify a good teacher when they meet one.
A real teacher never stops, but continues in school and out, by precept and example, to set high standards of disciplined character. The philosophic shortcomings of American mass education form a core of problems for higher education as well. Often the most severe criticism of American secondary education comes from the liberal arts faculties of our colleges and universities. They decry the intellectual material being sent them by the secondary schools and are openly contemptuous of the Education departments on their own campuses. Yet many of these critics of educationism are themselves empire builders of a sort.