Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A quote from Sayers on education, from a 1947 essay: For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain. That insight was one she brought home to her readers through such personal questions as this: Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

I like La Quinta . I've stayed many times at one of their hotels in Stamford, CT, typically when I have to be in NYC the following morning. I love some of the little things, like the fact that they have real wardrobes in their rooms, rather than closets. But I'm not crazy about the television advertisements. They have a series of ads that attempt to illustrate that a night's stay at La Quinta enables you to do great things, as defined by various clichés (have your ducks in a row, pull out all the stops, get a leg up on the competition, sell ice to Eskimos and so forth). The gag is that at the end of the ad the cliché is presented literally. The whole campaign is only mildly annoying. There are far worse. But there is one that especially annoys me. A business consultant should stay at La Quinta, we're told, because  when he does he can "think outside the box" at the meeting the next morning. The other presumably inferior consultants, who presumably stayed...