It is because mathematics is a means, and not an end, that a purely mathematical education is a bad education—or, rather, no education at all. For the true purpose of education is to teach men what things in life are genuinely valuable. That is, it is concerned with ends. Therefore education ought not to concentrate upon means. They are a secondary matter. The true order is to learn first what to aim at, and then only what are the instrumentalities by which we may attain our ends. Mathematics, accordingly, should be part of a subsequent technical training. Thus the now old-fashioned preference for a classical—which really meant a humanistic—over a mathematical education, although it may have degenerated into a prejudice or even a pigheaded obscurantism, was originally rooted in a true insight.
The impression that philosophical and scientific ideas cannot be explained in plain language to plain people is also in large measure due to the fact that philosophers and men of science have not, as a rule, the wit to do it. It is due, in plain terms, to the stupidity of the learned men, not to the stupidity of humanity. They lack the mental flexibility and adroitness which are required if they are to come out of their hiding places in the laboratory and the library and make themselves intelligible in the big world of men. They can speak only one language, the language of cast-iron technical formulas. Change the language, take away from them their technical terms and symbols, and they no longer know where they are. They are like those inferior boxers who can only box according to the rules and are nonplused by anyone who disregards them and fights as the light of nature teaches him. They lack too that human sympathy with simple people which is also essential if the teachings of science and philosophy are to be made available to the many. They cannot move with ease in the world of men. And these too are the reasons why erudite men, great figures in their own secluded world, are so often observed to behave like buffaloes in society.
(W. T. Stace, "The Snobbishness of the Learned," in Atlantic Essays, ed. Samuel N. Bogorad and Cary B. Graham [Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1958], 94-104, at 97-8 [italics in original] [essay first published in 1936])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 