Abstract

Russell Jacoby's study of American education is a welcome addition to a body of critical literature going back to Irving Babbitt and Henry Adams. Like his predecessors, Jacoby points to flaws in the way Americans educate their youth and expresses anxiety about one deteriorating institutions of learning. The most useful critical perspective, but one Jacoby takes only intermittently, treats with equal contempt all conventional political polarities. It is a perspective which recognizes, above all, the time-boundedness of all fashionable discourse. The conservative critique of the academy, which Jacoby properly takes apart, does not go as far back as Edmund Burke and the Council of Trent, as Jacoby believes.