Here is a well-meaning approach to education reform that is as subversive as it is impoverished. Does anyone really imagine that, given the choice, teachers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Jesus and Maimonides would opt for the online tutorial?

The great minds of the Western tradition believed that real knowledge — including moral wisdom — is communicated through concrete, embodied relationships. It is the give-and-take of the classroom, the educator fully present with his students, which makes possible the highest purposes of the academy. For the aim is not only to nurture minds that can think for themselves, but which pursue with integrity the great truths about the human condition. It is here, in the bricks and mortar of the academy, that deep friendships are formed, the moral and spiritual relationships that help us on our life's journey.

Can we afford to remain ignorant of this legacy in the West? Butler shrugs it off. "For most young people today," he writes, "electronic friendships and networks are the norm." There is no hint that anything whatsoever may be amiss with this trend.

Cicero sounded the alarm when he saw republican ideals fading from the public consciousness: "Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things." Our historical amnesia about the ends of the academy is widespread. We no longer treasure or guard those things once considered essential to education. No wonder we produce so many graduates with bad souls who cannot govern themselves.

Yet if we do not recover our cultural memory — if we worship at the altar of efficiency and economy — the explosive costs of a college degree will become a footnote in the crisis of the West.