Thanks for posting your whole article.
To get at the roots of education (and societal) decay, you’ve got to go a lot further back than Hofstadter. You need to look back at least as far as John Dewey, Charles Francis Potter’s Humanist Society and the Humanist Manifesto of Sellars and Bragg (1933.)
The beginnings of the erosion can be found mainly around the beginning of the 20th Century, but some aspects of the phenomenon go back as far as the inclusion of “Egalite” in the motto of the French Revolution, which, in practice and purpose became a gross mockery of our own American Revolution.
Then they sent US a statue and a load of cultural bilge along with it.
Good points. Except I would contend the problem arose not from the conclusion of “Equality” as an ideal, but rather its over-extension.
Equality, as in “All men are created equal” is at the very root of the American Revolution. But that men are created equal does not imply they will all achieve and be rewarded equally. All people should be equal in the political and legal areas of life, we all have the same rights.
Where Equality went off the tracks was when it started demanding Equal results. Everybody had to have the same Stuff, not just the same Rights.
All the leftist crap of the last 200 years has followed from this basic misunderstanding of what Equality means.