Davidson on Education

In an essay written in 1935 to document and explain the history of the book, I'll Take My Stand, Donald Davidson indicates that he and the other Agrarians wrote the book to Southerners as Southerners. He laments that perhaps, this was presumptuous. The Agrarians and the critics of the book did not even use the primary terms (Agrarianism and Industrialism) in the same way. Later he makes the following statement:

It was first of all a book for mature Southerners of the late nineteen-twenties, in the so-called New South - Southerners who, we trusted, were not so far gone in modern education as to require, for the act of comprehension, coloured charts, statistical tables, graphs, and journalistic monosullables, but were prepared to use intelligence and memory.

Wouldn't it be nice to have people like that? He didn't and I doubt we will either for a long time. But that is one of the things a good classical education seeks to remedy. The act of interacting with primary sources, as much as possible, helps build the kind of person who can use his intelligence and memory. Sure we use maps and sometimes charts to help us colect similar types of information. I think Davidson went a little too far. However, the modern education system, including modern journalism (which is supposed to be a primary agent of continuing education for adults) has reduced all learning to statistics, graphs, and monosyllables.