wall-mounted trophy head

"Modern public schooling is the wall-mounted trophy head of a formerly lionhearted education. Its truncated and lifeless hulk provides a tamed likeness of the once vibrant and powerful creature whose pursuit exhilarated the hearts and minds of countless students. To be the prey of such learning was to be mauled by beauty, truth, and goodness; to stalk it to its lair was an expedition fraught with danger and delight. Sadly, the taxidermists of modernity have done their work well. Public schooling is a hollow shell, a stuffed charade, a glass-eyed cadaver of the once substantive education preceding it. Public schooling is a poor imitation of true education -- an inert imposture that is rigid, posed, and dead."

-- from Millstones & Stumbling Blocks: Understanding Education in Post-Christian America