With the egalitarian spirit of American society, education is not what it once was. The classical and traditional models of education, such as those espoused by the Platonists and the Scholastics held value in discovering some form of higher reason. Education in the medieval universities emphasized things like grammar, logic, and rhetoric (and later geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music) as ways of distilling the Absolute into an accessible form. Moreover, in the classical world, this type education was not necessary for everyone, and hence the scholars were highly respected. At the same time, it was perfectly acceptable and respectable for a man to learn a trade in the city or to farm if he was a rural dweller.
Modern “education” is precisely the opposite: a bourgeois obscurantism which espouses a false sense of equality through standardization, and where every principle is subordinated to a manufactured and artificial ideal. This can be illustrated in a scene that I witnessed many years ago. I overheard some rather typical liberal arts students at a large university discussing the state of education in the United States. One of them claimed that mathematics, chemistry, and physics were “reactionary” disciplines. When challenged on this, he claimed that these disciplines are by and large “reactionary” because they are not accessible to everyone. Moreover, he claimed, mathematics and science espouse “negative absolutism,” because they do not allow for one’s emotions to be adequately expressed. To him the ideal fields of study were in the social sciences, because they served the ends of liberalism.
http://www.ridingthetiger.org/2012/03/19/the-farce-of-american-education/