Education Quote by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Gerould is diagnosing a double infection: a culture that can’t recognize real learning when it sees it, and a culture that doesn’t especially want to. The first clause lands like a quiet insult to the gatekeepers of higher education: “ignorance” isn’t lodged in the students alone, but in the institutional mindset that mistakes credentials, polish, or usefulness for education. “A consequent suspicion of it” is the sharper cut. Learning, in her framing, becomes morally suspect the moment it exceeds the obvious and the marketable; intellectual ambition reads as pretension, dissent, or waste.

Then she names the engine driving that suspicion: “materialism.” Not just greed, but a worldview that measures value by immediate return. The subtext is that colleges, tasked with cultivating judgment and depth, have begun acting like service providers: keep the customer happy, keep the outcomes legible, keep the friction low. Out of that comes “intellectual laxity,” a wonderfully damning phrase that suggests softness in standards and slackness in thinking. It’s not that people are incapable; it’s that the surrounding incentives reward the easy, the digestible, the job-adjacent.

The context matters: Gerould is writing in the early 20th century, when American higher education is rapidly expanding, professionalizing, and rebranding itself around utility, administration, and prestige. Her sentence carries the anxiety of an era watching the liberal arts get outbid by “practical” training. The rhetorical move is causal and cumulative: ignorance breeds suspicion; materialism breeds slackness; together they “do destructive work” quietly, from inside the colleges themselves.