"To create the power of competence without creating a corresponding direction to guide the use of that power is bad education"
About this Quote
Dickey’s line reads like a warning label on a machine: competence is horsepower, and education that forgets the steering wheel is a public hazard. As a politician, he isn’t romanticizing learning for learning’s sake; he’s thinking in downstream consequences. Train people to be efficient, persuasive, technically skilled, and you may simply be manufacturing better operators for whatever incentives happen to be on offer: profit, faction, vanity, even cruelty.
The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Power of competence” reframes ability as something inherently forceful, not neutral. Competence doesn’t just solve problems; it multiplies reach. In the early-to-mid 19th century, that reach was expanding fast: industrialization, bureaucratizing governments, mass print, professionalizing law and commerce. A society producing more specialists also produces more ways for specialists to do damage at scale. Dickey’s “corresponding direction” is an insistence that education must include moral and civic orientation - not as a decorative ethics unit, but as an integrated purpose that shapes how skill gets deployed.
The subtext is distrust of purely instrumental schooling. He’s critiquing an education that treats students as tools for the economy or the state while neglecting character, judgment, and allegiance to the common good. It’s also a veiled jab at political life itself: ambitious, capable people without guiding principles don’t become “leaders”; they become more effective opportunists.
What makes it stick is its asymmetry. We celebrate competence as an unquestioned good; Dickey points out that competence, unguided, is just upgraded capacity - for anyone’s ends.
The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Power of competence” reframes ability as something inherently forceful, not neutral. Competence doesn’t just solve problems; it multiplies reach. In the early-to-mid 19th century, that reach was expanding fast: industrialization, bureaucratizing governments, mass print, professionalizing law and commerce. A society producing more specialists also produces more ways for specialists to do damage at scale. Dickey’s “corresponding direction” is an insistence that education must include moral and civic orientation - not as a decorative ethics unit, but as an integrated purpose that shapes how skill gets deployed.
The subtext is distrust of purely instrumental schooling. He’s critiquing an education that treats students as tools for the economy or the state while neglecting character, judgment, and allegiance to the common good. It’s also a veiled jab at political life itself: ambitious, capable people without guiding principles don’t become “leaders”; they become more effective opportunists.
What makes it stick is its asymmetry. We celebrate competence as an unquestioned good; Dickey points out that competence, unguided, is just upgraded capacity - for anyone’s ends.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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