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Actually, disgruntled though I am by the present state of affairs in academia, I am not without optimism.

Home schooling, some private secondary schools and colleges, and an ever-widening array of information sources (the net, and cable and satellite TV and radio, for example) may serve to diminish the power of the ivory tower.

Though certainly not home schooled, I thankfully was spared the ordeal of public schools and was educated in a time when the values put forth here actually obtained. I had quite a rigorous education as a boy - more so than graduate students have today. I was quite surprised to find in my early adulthood that this was quite the exception rather than the rule, and we all know that public education was much better 40 years ago than it is today.

I taught at Berkeley, Stanford and NYU for a time in the late 70's to the mid 80's and was shocked then by the low level I saw at these schools. Today when I talk to college age people I find it hopeless(I am no longer an academic.)

I feel as distant from them as if I were born 200 years ago. It is hard for me to be as sanguine as you are about the future of education in or nation even among elites.

I can only hope that the Leftist ascendancy of the 1960's is but a passing thing and as that generation goes some sort of sanity and equilibrium shall be restored. It shall take a strong and determined new generation to set things right, or so it seems to me. They will have to almost reinvent the wheel; it will seem a sort of "intellectual archeology.

Where there is a will there is a way, I guess. It is hard for me, however, to shake my pessimism.