American average

"I do not think that there is a country in the world where, in proportion to population, so few ignorant and fewer learned men are found than in America.

Primary instruction there is within reach of each; higher instruction is within reach of almost no one.

One understands this without difficulty, and it is so to speak the necessary result of what we advanced above.

Almost all Americans are comfortable; they can therefore readily procure for themselves the first elements of human knowledge.

In America there are few rich; almost all Americans therefore need to practice a profession. Now, every profession requires an apprenticeship. Americans, therefore, can only give the first years of life to the general cultivation of intelligence: at fifteen they enter into a career; thus their education most often ends in the period when ours begins. If it is pursued beyond this, it is then directed only toward a special and lucrative matter; one studies a science as one takes up a trade; and one takes from it only the applications whose present utility is recognized.

In America most of the rich have begun by being poor; almost all the idle were, in their youth, employed; the result is that when one could have the taste for study, one does not have the time to engage in it; and when one has acquired the time to engage in it, one no longer has the taste for it.

There does not exist in America, therefore, any class in which the penchant for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with comfort and inherited leisure, and which holds the works of the intellect in honor.

Thus the will to engage in these works is lacking as much as is the power.

In America a certain common level in human knowledge has been established. All minds have approached it; some by being raised to it, others by being lowered to it.

One therefore encounters an immense multitude of individuals who have nearly the same number of notions in matters of religion, of history, of science, of political economy, of legislation, of government. Intellectual inequality comes directly from God, and man cannot prevent it from existing always.

But it happens, at least from what we have just said, that intelligence, while remaining unequal as the Creator wished, finds equal means at its disposition."

- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, Harvey C. Mansfield, Delba Winthrop