American university authority: sub specie scientiae/academiae

"...As many professions as feasible would locate the center of their authority within university schools. By defining its functions comprehensively and constantly expanding its clientele, the American university would serve to enhance the public's image of a professional authority in the society.
"The weight of that authority could not be minimized in a nation that not only lacked respect for historical tradition but which, for the most part, lacked a common past.
...
"Americans lacked tradition as a source of authority, but did not lack 'science'. It was the primary function of American universities to render universal scientific standards credible to the public. Indeed, by means of science cultivated within the university, Americans even discovered the origins of a usable history in the German forest and on the American frontier -- a scientific history now pioneered by professional scholars. To the middle-class American in the later nineteenth century, science implied more than method and procedure."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 325-326.

the new objectivity of late 19th-century higher education

"By screening students upon entrance, formalizing courses of study, publishing textbooks, standardizing examinations, and awarding degrees, higher educators convinced the public that objective principles rather than subjective partisanship determined competence in American life."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 124.

a secular theodicy in Victorian America

"In part, the success of the culture of professionalism could be attributed to the fact that American Mid-Victorians constructed a secular theodicy. Despite its flux, madness, and seeming irrationality, the world was a rational place, and every person could discover his 'real me' within the natural confines of space and time. Such firm notions as career and character, for instance, organized a human life totally, from beginning to end....To know that every occurrence had a reason, a justification, both emboldened and inspired a Mid-Victorian. The scientific assurance that the most despised weakness -- human failure -- was rooted within the nature of the fallen victim resolved the thorny question of responsibility. Success was a personal triumph for the middle-class individual, as failure was a personal disaster.
"Evil in the Mid-Victorian theodicy stemmed from the inability to realize one's potential, the inability to commit oneself to place and time, to subjugate carnal desires and their distractions, to approach a life professionally. The flaw was internal. Society blamed the ineffectual individual for his own failure. No one else was at fault."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 112-113.

'Professor' of all trades

"Similarly, in the American college all regular faculty members called themselves 'Professor'; in England only the select few who held chairs in a university acquired the title, with lesser faculty known as readers and lecturers. In nineteenth-century America, 'Professor' was a grandiose title quickly appropriated by anyone who claimed to make a living at a skill, or according to Bartlett [in Dictionary of Americanisms, 1877], who pretended to 'make a profession of anything.' Barbers called themselves 'Professor,' as did dancing-masters, banjo players, tailors, phrenologists, acrobats, boxers, music-hall piano players, and public teachers of all sorts."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 20-21.

colonization of the body, by 1883

"'In the brief period of less than fifty years,' N. S. Davis, president of the American Medical Association, told his colleagues in 1883, 'we have specialists for almost every part or region of the human body.'"

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 85. 

Strauss on Hegel, Goethe, and 'historical criticism'

"When [the Hegelians] appeal to Hegel himself and protest that he would not have recognized my book* as an expression of his own feelings, I agree. Hegel was personally no friend of historical criticism. It annoyed him, as it annoyed Goethe, [to] see the heroic figures of antiquity, to which their higher feelings clung lovingly, gnawed at by critical doubt. If, occasionally, these figures were puffs of mist which they took to be pieces of rock, they did not want to know; they did not want to be disturbed in the illusion by which they felt exalted."

-- *In Defense of My 'Life of Jesus' against the Hegelians, 1838, David Friedrich Strauss, cited in The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, George S. Williamson, 2004, p. 159.

a Romantic Bible

"...Friedrich Schlegel spoke at times of creating a 'new Bible.' The early Romantics showed little interest in the narratives or stories of the actual Bible, which they rejected on both aesthetic and philosophical grounds. In 'Christianity or Europe?' Novalis expressed an aversion to the Bible 'philology' of contemporary Protestantism, while Schleiermacher described the Bible as a 'mausoleum of religion'. What Friedrich Schlegel had in mind was rather a 'new gospel' that Lessing had invoked two decades earlier in 'The Education of the Human Race' (1780)."

-- The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, George S. Williamson, 2004, p. 55.

the K-12 of social and political pedagogics

just as some elementary school student is not expected to be able to act and work maturely in high school, it is naive and unrealistic to imagine that all people in any society are self-responsible enough to eg not passively eat foods making them obese, or be mature enough to vote in some serious way on a referendum or election...
any society is more like a K-12 school than a graduating class

posthumous meaning?

"Carl Becker has pointed out the 'uses of posterity' for the philosophes of the eighteenth century: the judgment of the court of history provided a kind of secular immortality for those who had worked long and earnestly to further the good of the human spirit. Those nineteenth-century intellectuals who theorized about their own role also needed to be remembered, needed to be able to project the approval of their sub-group into the future, and to console themselves with the thought that (however little acclaim they might receive in their generation) they would be remembered as those who had in their day had charge of the light."
posthumous meaning?
-- The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century, Ben Knights, 1978, p. 8.
   

Karamzin, 1790, on the idle British rich

"Anyone who believes that happiness consists in riches and luxuries ought to be shown the many Croesuses here who, surrounded by every means of enjoyment, have lost the taste for all enjoyments, and whose souls die long before they themselves do. The is the English spleen! This moral sickness, which might also be called by a more Russian name -- boredom -- is known in all lands, but it is worse here than anywhere else because of the climate, the heavy food, and excessive quietude, so like sleep.
"What a strange creature man is! When he has cares and anxieties -- he complains; when he has everything, when he is carefree -- he yawns. Out of boredom the rich Englishman travels; out of boredom becomes a hunter, squanders money, marries, shoots himself. He is unhappy from happiness! I am speaking of the idle rich, whose grandfathers amassed fortunes in India, for those who are busy, directing world trade and devising new ways of playing with the imaginary needs of the people, do not know what spleen is."

-- from London, 1790, Letter of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Karamzin, [Columbia University Press, NY, 1957], p. 333-334.