Chapter 6: "Classical Education"
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When fascists adopt classical education, … they rely on the flattened, instrumentalized version of it, which does nothing to challenge the practice of viewing people solely in terms of their productive capacity—in the case of women, the capacity to produce children, and in the case of men, the capacity for labor. The Nazis, for example, who praised the virtues of an education in Western civilization, were also responsible for the mass extermination of disabled people. According to the distinguished historian of Nazism Nikolaus Wachsmann, the main criterion in selecting which disabled people should be gassed was "the patients' ability to work: anyone regarded as unproductive would be killed."

— Jason Stanley

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "When fascists adopt classical education, … they rely on the flattened, instrumentalized version of it, which does nothing to challenge the practice of viewing people solely in terms of their productive capacity—in the case of women, the capacity to produce children, and in the case of men, the capacity for labor. The Nazis, for example, who praised the virtues of an education in Western civilization, were also responsible for the mass extermination of disabled people. According to the distinguished historian of Nazism Nikolaus Wachsmann, the main criterion in selecting which disabled people should be gassed was "the patients' ability to work: anyone regarded as unproductive would be killed."" in the context of "Chapter 6: "Classical Education"" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Jason Stanley" (Quotes, ''Erasing History (2024)) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Jason Stanley

About Jason Stanley

Jason Stanley (born 1969) is an American philosopher, teacher, and writer. He serves as the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.