The academia-jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by
the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation—in those incubators of
lethargy known as “Progressive” schools, which are dedicated to the task of
crippling a child’s mind by arresting his cognitive development. (See “The
Comprachicos” in my book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial
Revolution.) It appears,
however, that the “progressive” rich will be the first victims of their own
social theories: it is the children of the well-to-do who emerge from expensive
nursery schools and colleges as hippies, and destroy the remnants of their
paralyzed brains by means of drugs.
The middle class has created an antidote which is perhaps the most hopeful
movement of recent years: the spontaneous, unorganized, grass-roots revival of
the Montessori system of education—a system aimed at the development of a
child’s cognitive, i.e., rational, faculty.