the corporate world, what Christopher Hays calls "the elites" in the current issue of The Nation, to be hopeful about what this sort of thing will produce:

http://www.thenation.com/article/168265/why-elites-fail

mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking."
– U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, On the Poverty of Student Life (1966).

"Once upon a time the universities were respected; the student persists in the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he arrived too late. The bygone excellence of bourgeois culture (By this we mean the culture of a Hegel or of the encyclopédistes, rather than the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure.) has vanished. A mechanically produced specialist is now the goal of the "educational system." A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking. Hence the decline of the universities and the automatic nullity of the student once he enters its portals. The university has become a society for the propagation of ignorance; "high culture" has taken on the rhythm of the production line; without exception, university teachers are cretins, men who would get the bird from any audience of schoolboys. But all this hardly matters: the important thing is to go on listening respectfully. In time, if critical thinking is repressed with enough conscientiousness, the student will come to partake of the wafer of knowledge, the professor will tell him the final truths of the world. Till then--a menopause of the spirit. As a matter of course the future revolutionary society will condemn the doings of lecture theatre and faculty as mere noise--socially undesirable. The student is already a very bad joke."

This is, of course, from 1968, meaning that I assume you believe this to be true of all those who attended school in the '60s--and that it's more true of students from the '70s and later.

Of course, I assume that the nullity that one student became somehow was multiplied in order to become a cretin of a university professor. This would be, of course, Obama. How, exactly, multiplying a nullity gets you > 0 is a bit of a problem. And why it's a good thing to think that the necessary outcome of a prestigious school education is a nullity of a cretin that we can back for president seems to elude me. Then again, I attended college after the Strasbourgians decreed themselves the acme of intellectual thought for the remainder of the millennium.

The problem is that this is a manifesto, a literary genre that's pretty much lost--and never widespread in the US. Like A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/slap.html) it is not so much a fact-based assertion as a vaunting of ego and assertion of supremacy coupled with a claim on obeisance. Khlebnikov and others who wrote that "We alone are the face of our Time. Through us the horn of time blows in the art of the world" as an act of impudence. Similar screeds were commonplaces, the dedicated puffery of a disenchanted error, a kind of extramural match between world-class teams of well-trained effetes wearing their team colors. We like to ignore their affrontery to us because that would make our views into satire aimed against ourselves. Such affrontery can only be applied to those we don't like: We are, vicariously, Strasbourgians even though they'd spit on us because, well, we don't want to admit that our umbrellas aren't out to protect us from rain but from 44-year-old saliva.

At least Khlebnikov understood that brevity was the soul of wit. T'is too true, as the Strasbourgian students all too amply demonstrated. As for me, I prefer my motley, crew.

I just like the statement I quoted, bec. I believe it describes what tends to go on.

I do think education has gone downhill since the 70's; but I'm not quite old enough, or knowledgeable enough, to compare it to earlier times.