"The assumption is all but universal among those who control our educational policies from the elementary grades to the university that anything that sets bounds to the free unfolding of the temperamental proclivities of the young, to their right of self-expression, as one may say, is outworn prejudice. Discipline, so far as it exists, is not of the humanistic or the religious type, but of the kind that one gets in training for a vocation or a specialty. The standards of a genuinely liberal education, as they have been understood, more or less from the time of Aristotle, are being progressively undermined by the utilitarians and the sentimentalists. If the Baconian-Rousseauistic formula is as unsound in certain of its postulates as I myself believe, we are in danger of witnessing in this country one of the great cultural tragedies of the ages."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Irving Babbitt, "What I Believe" (1930), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), p. 16
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Liberal_arts
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Irving Babbitt
Irving Babbitt (August 2, 1865 – July 15, 1933) was an American academic and literary critic, noted for his founding role in a movement that became known as the New Humanism.
23 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Irving Babbitt →
Related Quotes
"The true dualism I take to be the contrast between two wills, one of which is felt as vital impulse (élan vital) and …"
"The greatest of vices according to Buddha is the lazy yielding to the impulses of temperament (pamada); the greatest …"
"The reasons for putting humanistic truth above scientific truth are not metaphysical but very practical: the discipli…"
"Both emotional nationalism and emotional internationalism go back to Rousseau, but in his final emphasis he is an emo…"
"I chanced recently to be glancing over … a book on Japanese Buddhism, and I read among other things that several cent…"
"The complaint is often heard at present that there is an increasing exodus from the difficult and disciplinary subjec…"
"The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, …"
"Those who are filled with concern for the lot of humanity as a whole, especially for the less fortunate portions of i…"
"Three or four years ago a distinguished Frenchman, M. Hovelacque, published an article on America in the Revue de Par…"
"What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of libert…"