LvMI just put up a free PDF copy of The Theory of Education in the United States, by Albert Jay Nock.

I’ve been wanting to read this one for a while, a collection of lectures given at the University of Virginia, just on the other side of town.

I’ve only just started the book, but already I’ve found one passage laugh-out-loud funny:

A few months ago, an Italian nobleman, one of the most accomplished men in Europe, told me that he had had a curious experience in our country; he wondered whether I had made anything like the same observation, and if so, how I accounted for it. He said he had been in America several times, and had met some very well-educated men, as an Italian would understand the term; but they were all in the neighborhood of sixty years old. Under that age, he said, he had happened upon no one who impressed him as at all well-educated.

I told him that he had been observing the remnant of a pre-revolutionary product, and coming from a country that had had the Sicilian Vespers and Rienzi and Masaniello and now Mussolini, he should easily understand what that meant; that our educational system had been thoroughly reorganized, both in spirit and structure, about thirty-five years ago, and that his well-educated men of sixty or so were merely holdovers from what we now put down, by general consent, as the times of ignorance — holdovers from pre-Fascist days, if I might borrow the comparison.

“But,” I went on, “our younger men are really very keen; they are men of parts, and our schools and universities do an immense deal for them. Just try to come round one of them about the merits of a bond-issue or a motor-car, the fine points of commercial cake-icing or retail shoe merchandising, or the problems of waste motion involved in bricklaying or in washing dishes for a hotel, and you are sure to find that he will give a first-rate account of himself, and that he reflects credit on the educational system that turned him out.”

My friend looked at me a moment in a vacant kind of way, and presently said that proficiency in these pursuits was not precisely what he had in mind when he spoke of education.

“Just so,” I replied, “but it is very much what we have in mind. We are all for being practical in education. Do you know, it would not surprise me in the least to find that our Russian friends had taken a leaf out of our book in designing their Five-Year Plan?”

He looked at me again for a moment, and changed the subject. I thought of explaining myself, but saw it would be of no use; my little pleasantry had been dashed to pieces against the solid adamant of his patrician seriousness.