Current educational rhetoric...

Note the bent of the [current educational] rhetoric. We are to have a noble citizenry: but how exactly are citizens to be ennobled? manifestos canvassed for the reform of education have run thus ever since. They depart from the hard, specific, and achievable so that they may embrace the soft, indefinite, and ungraspable. While spraying sunny ideals with high-sounding words, their advocates seek deliverance in vague, half-realized science and good feelings.
~T.L. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, p.209