In Praise of... Sir Peter Medawar and Reason

Yesterday I came upon this critique of Pere Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, via a commenter at Butterflies and Wheels. I think it is a marvellous piece of clear thinking and debunking of obfuscatory hyperbole. For those of you who cannot be bothered to read the whole thing, I recommend this wonderful paragraph - it is particularly relevant to these days when 50% must go into tertiary education.
"How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind, for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought."
Elitist? Possibly, but elitism is such a slippery word. We all applaud excellence and abhor giving unfair social advantage to the already advantaged. Perhaps secondary and tertiary educational institutions should make greater efforts to inculcate the capacity for analytical thought. It is sadly lacking in many graduates, and one PhD of my acquaintance.