44 years later, I wonder if they would think the "great experiment" a success?

     "If education is the transmission of civilization, we are unquestionably progressing.  Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we would be savages again.  So our finest contemporary achievement is our unprecedented expenditure of wealth and toil in the provision of higher education for all.  Once colleges were luxuries, designed for the male half of the leisure class; today universities are so numerous that he who runs may become a Ph.D.  We may not have excelled the selected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the level and average of knowledge beyond any age in history.
     "None but a child will complain that our teachers have not yet eradicated the errors and superstitions of ten thousand years.  The great experiment has just begun, and it may yet be defeated by the high birth rate of unwilling or indoctrinated ignorance.  But what would be the full fruitage of instruction if every child should be schooled till at least his twentieth year, and should find free access to the universities, libraries, and museums that harbor and offer the intellectual and artistic treasures of the race?  Consider education not as a painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life."
-Will and Ariel Durant, excerpted from the essay, Is Progress 
Real? from their book, The Lessons of History, 1968.