old skool rhetoric

Richard Mitchell: The Graves of Academe: "And the "argument" put forth in support of that thesis is itself a dramatic example of worthy disregard for mere information:
It was not illiterate, backward men who spiked our residential skylines with steel forests of television antennas, spoiled our rivers with the defecations of a hundred "growth" industries, fouled our air with the sooty contrails of a thousand jet planes taking off daily, or choked our cities with automobiles that cost as much to park as to buy. That work was accomplished by men whose schooling enabled them to develop transistors, no-deposit-no-return bottles, pressurized cabins, and a 36-months-to-pay economy.

You say you want to understand how a modern technological society works? Well, now you know. Men with schooling cunningly trick the multitudes into buying television antennas and driving expensive cars. Educated elitists force decent citizens to travel in airplanes and callously require them to dispose of bottles at their own expense. It isn't the "illiterate, backward men" who visit these horrors on us; untainted by "excellence narrowly defined," they can manage only rape, murder, arson, and an occasional gas-station stickup.
This amazingly stupid oversimplification is perfectly typical of educational theory."