Crowd Culture

Bernard Iddings Bell, Crowd Culture: An Examination of the American Way of Life (the introduction and the first chapter)

It is truly unfortunate that, until now, the work of Canon Bernard Iddings Bell has been out of print for some time. For Bell's cultural criticism was an important impetus to the formation of the postwar traditionalist conservative synthesis, drawing the attention of Russell Kirk and others. In Crowd Culture, a remarkably prescient work originally published in 1952 (before the words "dumbing down" had ever been uttered), Bell excoriated the complacent and conformist egalitarian ethos that he believed was undermining American education, religion, and culture. In an age of stultifying homogenization, Bell's relevance has never seemed greater.

List of (some? all?) his books

History of Bard

Bernard Iddings Bell
Warden of the College 1919–1933
"No facts taught here are worth anything until students have assimilated them, correlated them, interpreted them. It is the student, not the bit of knowledge, that we are teaching."

Andrew Cusack's blog entry