William Alan Henry III (1950–1994) was an American cultural critic and author.
Where a generation ago people felt entitled to a chance at education, they now feel entitled to the credential affirming that they have completed a course of study regardless of their actual mastery.
The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.
A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing.
No longer a mark of distinction or proof of achievement, a college education is these days a mere rite of passage, a capstone to adolescent party time.
In the unexamined American Dream rhetoric promoting mass higher education in the nation of my youth, the implicit vision was that one day everyone, or at least practically everyone, would be a manager or a professional. We would use the most elitist of all means, scholarship, toward the most egalitarian of ends. We would all become chiefs; hardly anyone would be left a mere Indian.
Ultimately it is the yearning to believe that anyone can be brought up to college level that has brought colleges down to everyone's level.
The fact is that some people are better than others - smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace.
The very essence of school is elitism. Schools exist to teach, to test, to rank hierarchically to promote the idea that knowing and understanding more is better than knowing and understanding less.
Opportunity does not need to be exactly equal. It needs only to exist. For the talented and motivated, that will be enough. . . The vital thing is not to maximize everyone's performance, but to ensure maximal performance from the most talented, the ones who can make a difference.
Any departure from fact is the first step on a slippery slope toward unbelievability.
In my mind, partial failure is always better than delusory success.
One's worth and self-regard ought to come from individual competitive performance, not from group identity. Pride based on clan or tribal connections is atavistic. It appeals to people who fear they cannot succeed as individuals, and by diverting their energies it all but ensures they will not succeed as individuals.
It is a commonplace observation that liberals believe in the perfectibility of man while conservatives believe in the endurance of original sin. Superficially, that would suggest that conservatives take a more understanding and indulgent view of individual lapses, while liberals take a more harshly judgmental one. In fact, we know, quite the opposite is the case.