On the "Degree Fetish"

An excellent article on elitism among our ruling political class, by Michael Knox Beran, writing for National Review Online:

The culture wars that have lifted Sarah Palin to prominence are best understood as an expression of popular frustration with a dwindling supply of cultural goods. The social state has banished a variety of these goods from places (such as schools) where they once traded briskly. Education in the West has traditionally been the process by which grown-ups civilize the young by introducing them to their moral and cultural heritage. America’s public schools have abdicated this role; traditional methods of cultural initiation have been replaced by vapid forms of “social” study. Social education, Paul Goodman said, is founded on the belief that children are “human social animals” who must be “socialized” and “adjusted to the social group.” The Faustian disavowal of the moral imagination, together with an embrace of a barren philosophy of acultural socialization, has resulted in ever more culturally vacuous public schools.