Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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No, the modern revolutionary movement is not interpreted at the university of Lee-Higginson. What is interpreted? I have a list of some of the titles of “theses in English,” accepted for the Ph.D. degree by Harvard University in the last ten years, and representing Harvard’s view of general culture. Slaves in Boston’s great department store, in which Harvard University owns twenty-five hundred shares of stock, be reconciled to your long hours and low wages and sentence to die of tuberculosis—because upon the wealth which you produce some learned person has prepared for mankind full data on “The Strong Verb in Chaucer.” Policemen who have had your strike smashed by Harvard students, rest content with your starvation wages—because one of these students has enlightened mankind on “The Syntax of the Infinitive in Shakespeare.” Girls who work in the textile mills, who walk the streets of the “she-towns” of New England and part with your virtue for the price of a sandwich, be rejoiced—because you have made it possible for humanity to be informed concerning “The Subjunctive in Layamon’s ‘Brut.’” Men who slave twelve hours a day in front of blazing white furnaces of Bethlehem, Midvale and Illinois Steel, cheer up and take a fresh grip on your shovels—you are making it possible for mankind to acquire exact knowledge concerning “The Beginnings of the Epistolary Novel in the Romance Languages.” Miners, who toil in the bowels of the earth in hourly danger of maiming and suffocation, be reconciled to the failure of a great university to install safety devices to protect your lives—because that money has gone to the collecting and editing of “Political Ballads Issued During the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole.” Peons, who quiver under the lash of the masters’ whip beneath tropic suns in Central America, be docile—because your labors helped to pay off the bonds of the United Fruit Company, so that a Harvard scholar might win a teaching position by compiling “Chapters in the History of Literary Patronage from Chaucer to Caxton.”