H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) left us with a voluminous oeuvre chock-full of quote-worthy observations that are as irreverent and thought-provoking as they are incisive and sagacious. Here’s an excerpt from his essay “The Golden Age of Pedagogy,” published on June 6, 1927, in the Baltimore Evening Sun:
The stray student of genuine intelligence must find life in the great rolling-mills of learning very unpleasant, and I suppose that he seldom stays until the end of his course. He must see very quickly that the learning on tap in them is mainly formal and bogus – that it consists almost wholly of feeble nonsense out of text-books, put together by men who are unable either to write or to think. And he must discover anon that its embellishment by the faculty is almost as bad – that very few college instructors, as he encounters them in practice, actually know anything worth knowing about the subject they presume to teach. Has the college its stars – great whales of learning, eminent in the land? Well, it is not often that an undergraduate so much as sees those whales, and seldom indeed that he has any communion with them. The teaching is done almost exclusively by understrappers, and the distinguishing marks of those understrappers is that they are primarily pedagogues, not scholars. The fact that one of them teaches English instead of mathematics and another mathematics instead of English is trivial and largely accidental. Of a thousand head of such dull drudges not ten, with their doctors’ dissertations behind them, ever contribute so much as a flyspeck to the sum of human knowledge.
It’s amazing to think that such a biting and caustic passage was written in 1927, long before the rise of such fields as critical theory, gender studies, women’s studies, social justice, environmental sustainability, etc. What would the “Sage of Baltimore” have to say about today’s academic environment?