Eliot's Disintegration of Western Culture

No one can become really educated, he wrote, without having pursued some study in which he took no rest. Rejecting set curricula ravages not only the older regime of classical education, but also any traditional form of liberal learning that has taken upon itself the splendid burden of pointing up the knowledge most worth knowing. It is we, not they who have gone before us, who cut a poor and disjointed figure in the eyes of history.