After viewing this powerful documentary, The College Conspiracy, discover how the great Albert Jay Nock predicted eighty years ago the serious crisis that has now gripped higher education. In his incisive book, The Theory of Education in the United States, Nock warned about the growing egalitarian assumptions that all students were equally educable, that all students should be college bound, and there is no fundamental distinctions to be made between “education” and “training.” These fallacious assumptions are now codified as dogma in such monstrosities as No Child Left Behind.
2:45 pm on May 29, 2012“Our system is based upon the assumption, popularly regarded as implicit in the doctrine of equality, that everybody is educable. This has been taken without question from the beginning; it is taken without question now. The whole structure of our system, the entire arrangement of its mechanics, testifies to this. Even our truant laws testify to it, for they are constructed with exclusive reference to school-age, not to school-ability.
“When we attempt to run this assumption back to the philosophical doctrine of equality, we cannot do it; it is not there, nothing like it is there. The philosophical doctrine of equality gives no more ground for the assumption that all men are educable than it does for the assumption that all men are six feet tall. We see at once, then, that it is not the philosophical doctrine of equality, but an utterly untenable popular perversion of it, that we find at the basis of our educational system.”
