The recent posting on mises.org of Nock’s lecture “The Theory of Education in the United States” resonated with me because I still remember attending my high school and college classes asking “Where did the Latin go?”  I felt like Diogenes.looking for an honest education.

So after reading Nock’s lecture, I was struck by it’s similarity with the preface to the second German edition of Mises’s Socialism.  Here’s the sixth paragraph from the Nock lecture: “Perhaps we are not fully aware of the extent to which instruction and
education are accepted as being essentially the same thing. I think you
would find, if you looked into it, for instance, that all the formal
qualifications for a teacher’s position rest on this understanding. A
candidate is certificated — is he not? — merely as having been exposed
satisfactorily to a certain kind of instruction for a certain length of
time, and therefore he is assumed eligible to a position which we all
agree that only an educated person should fill. Yet he may not be at
all an educated person, but only an instructed person. We have seen
many such, and five minutes’ talk with one of them is quite enough to
show that the understanding of instruction as synonymous with education
is erroneous. They are by no means the same thing.”

And here is the twentieth paragraph of Mises’s preface: “The habit of talking and writing about economic affairs without having probed relentlessly to the bottom of their problems has taken the zest out of public discussions on questions vital to human society and diverted politics into paths that lead directly to the destruction of all civilization. The proscription of economic theory, which began with the German historical school, and today finds expression notably in American Institutionalism, has demolished the authority of qualified thought on these matters. Our contemporaries consider that anything which comes under the heading of Economics and Sociology is fair game to the unqualified critic. It is assumed that the trade union official and the entrepreneur are qualified by virtue of their office alone to decide questions of political economy. “Practical men” of this order, even those whose activities have, notoriously, often lead to failure and bankruptcy, enjoy a spurious prestige as economists which should at all costs be destroyed. On no account must a disposition to avoid sharp words be permitted to lead to a compromise. It is time these amateurs were unmasked.”

The proscription of Latin and Greek (mentioned elsewhere in Nock’s lecture) is exactly parallel to the proscription of economic theory mentioned by Mises.  And those proscriptions destroy the foundations of thought in their respective disciplines.  (And thus any standard to measure qualifications, in particular for elective office. I’ve started to think that the Mises Institute should develop and proctor short exams on economics for any candidate for office.)

Also, the proscription of economic thought causes the need for Mises to open Human Action with a section on epistemology.  Mises has to restore the foundations without which his magnum opus cannot stand.