Happy Birthday, Mencken

H.L. Mencken was born on this date in 1880.

I believe that it would be rational to argue that the public school, far from combating this immense increase in stupidity, has been very largely responsible for it. For the true aim and purpose of the pedagogue, and especially of the pedagogue who is also a bureaucrat, is never to awaken his victims to independent and logical thought; it is simply to force them into a mold. And that mold is bound to be a cramped and dingy one, for the pedagogue is a cramped and dingy man himself. The office he fills, in its potentialities, is an immensely important one, but in its daily business it is puerile and uninspiring, and so it is seldom filled by a man (or woman) of any genuine force and originality. In all ages pedagogues have been the bitterest enemies of all genuine intellectual enterprise, and in no age have they warred upon it more violently or to sadder effect than in our own. More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people. They would have done even worse, I believe, if it had been in their power. They failed only because a sufficient number of their victims have always been too intelligent to succumb to them, and because even the stupid majority yet preserves a saving skepticism about their ridiculous arcane. …

The basic trouble with the public schools is that they have fallen into the hands of a well-organized and extremely ambitious bureaucracy, and that machinery for curbing its pretensions has yet to be devised. In every American municipality, though all of them are desperately hard up and many are hopelessly bankrupt, it has resisted every effort to cut down its demands on the public treasury, and in this black year of 1933 it will actually get a larger relative share of the public money than ever before. It has thrown the grotesque mantle of Service about its extortions, and convinced millions of the unthinking that they are essential to the public good. Let any rash fellow challenge it, and he is denounced at once as an enemy to the true, the good and the beautiful.

H.L. Mencken