The purpose of education in this age or any other...

Modern man's inveterate tendency to supplant the normative with the operational-- to ask, What can be done? instead of , What ought to be done?-- characterizes today's educational policies...

[But] when we accept the tyranny of the real over the ideal, we deny the human spirit-- the better half of learning and the better half of man.  Instead, we concentrate on his Caliban half, making him a more efficient berry-gatherer, a more discriminating shell collector, or a more willing water-carrier. The notion of spirit we dismiss as mythological, out-of-date, and irrelevant; at any rate, the fact that it cannot be seen in space or under a microscope makes it, in the end, no longer a proper subject for instruction...

Our fascination with technical means, by the very nature of things, subverts the supreme task of education-- the cultivation of the human spirit: to teach the young to know what is good, to serve it above self, to reproduce it, and to recognize that in knowledge lies this responsibility.

~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, pp.11-13