Discussing the New South Creed

The article "Engineers and the New South Creed” brought up several questions to my mind. First the concepts of intellectual elitism as opposed to class elitism. I had heard of the idea of a meritocracy before, but this was the first time that I had actually read about people who really believed it and were putting their ideas into action. Or at least the first time I had read about them doing it so explicitly. The question this brought to my mind was how did this actually work out? How much of an impact did this new trend have on modern day society? I would assume that it actually had quite a large impact since people with higher educations generally are treated with more respect than people who only graduated from high school, but I don't know how much of that is due to this particular group of people and how much of it is due to the greater demand for people with higher education as technology becomes more advanced. Another thing that I found interesting was the rhetoric used in these people's arguments. They were much more aggressive than modern speakers. Lyman Hall said that they were declaring war on the North by building the textile department, because it would free them from their dependence on the North. And Robert Thurston’s statements on how certain people were better suited to using their hands and others were better suited to using their minds was also much to the point than what a speaker on the subject would say today even if they had the same views. So what changed this? Was it because the Civil War and the reconstruction period following it were in the recent past or did events later in the 20^th century effect how people thought. Or maybe I’m wrong about this and I just haven’t been reading the works of modern speakers who use this sort of rhetoric. I also found the idea that schools were places for economic growth very interesting. Of course the very fact that the schools educate people who then enter the work force will benefit the economy of the region, but the fact that the schools themselves could produce and sell actual goods is one that I haven’t really thought of before. Eventually schools stopped doing this, but was it because it wasn’t commercially viable or because commercial manufactures didn’t want the competition and forced them to stop. In class we discussed how the sports department brought in money for the school. So is it possible that schools have transformed from providing actual material goods to sell to providing services, other than the actual education process, such as reference materials and entertainment?