Did the principle of broadly educating the masses, generated in the aftermath of World War II, really improve democracy? Did it make U.S. citizens more thoughtful, less easily manipulated, more democratic in instinct, more public minded, more insistent on transparent governance, or more oriented toward justice than self-interest? Did it bring about better leadership or more political accountability? If such accomplishments seem dubious during the four long decades of the Cold War that would constitute the test period for this experiment in what Christopher Newfield has dubbed “high-quality mass higher education,” it is important to remember that these same decades featured the civil rights movement, feminism, sustained challenges to inequality and to Cold War ideology, and an explosion of other justice-minded cultural, artistic, and civic practices. Moreover, mass quality education held out the promise of citizens who were knowing enough about history, power, foreign affairs, language, affect, and meaning to give substance to the notion of choosing their own ends in life, as well as choosing and checking political representatives. To be “knowing enough,” Socrates would remind us, above all entails humility before the vastness and complexity of the world, an appreciation of what one does not know. Such humility and appreciation are precisely what is disappearing from popular political discourse in the United States; smugness in ignorance is notably more common.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 380