Why Stan be making fun of my school? Not that it was without its problems:

When my students come to talk with me in my office, they often exhibit a Franciscan humility. "Do you have a moment?" ... Their presences tend to be very light; they almost never change the temperature of the room. The walk is slow; speech is careful, sweet, a bit weary, and without strong inflection. They are almost unfailingly polite. They don't want to offend me; I could hurt them, savage their grades...They scare me a little, these kind and melancholy students, who themselves seem rather frightened of their own lives.
-UVA professor Mark Edmundson in a Harper's Magazine article "On the Uses of a Liberal Education"

Perhaps Stan's ideas on education and art are informed by a more erudite source.

To return to my lecturing days: I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase "sincere and simple"—"Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple and sincere"—under the impression that this was the greatest compliment payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the phrase out, which I did with such rage that it ripped the paper, the student complained that this was what teachers had always taught him: "Art is simple, art is sincere." Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
-"Strong Opinions" Valdimir Nabokov

There are a lot of different reasons for helping out your friends. One particular reason was best stated in Tombstone (for my money the best Wyatt Earp movie ever made) by Doc Holliday (for my money the biggest badass ever portrayed on film).

"Why're you helping Wyatt like this, Doc?"
"Wyatt's my friend."
"Well, Wyatt's got lots of friends."
"I don't..."
-"Tombstone" Doc Holliday

Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
-"To His Coy Mistress" Andrew Marvell

The thing I like about "To His Coy Mistress" is not the carpe diem theme, which pops up all over the place in poetry of the time, but the promise to make the time pass faster by speeding up the sun. I also like the way it completely anticipates Marvin Gaye and his greatest song.

Imitation is, after a fashion, the sincerest form of flattery. One hopes that this covers the compulsive collection and retelling of quoted material as well. Having been introduced to the blog by the best man, but being daunted by the impressively high quality of his musings, I will start out small, using words that are, largely, not my own. My own work has gone into collecting and compiling these quotes, and perhaps there is some creativity in identifying and editing them. But, more to the point, you are what you read. Are you immensely pleased.

And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
-"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" David Foster Wallace