A truly excellent rant

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense
culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can
barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at
school longer than any society in human history, entering
kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best
part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in
Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the
present. A classical education considers society as a kind
of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the
surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in
the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the
seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface
gets thinner and thinner.

Read the whole thing.

Tip from Jonah Goldberg at The Corner.