David Brooks has a talent for the self-serving hyperbolic register. A reader of his latest exercise pretentiously titled Honor Code will be a bit taken aback by the rhetorical lengths he resorts to, as an argumentative ground to this latest essay. The ground is that American education is deeply hostile to nonconformist boys in it's Liberal Feminist myopia: social engineering. Little Prince Hal is the victim and hero of this political,moral melodrama. Of course, my few lines are very reductive of the essay, but Mr. Brooks is a very adept yarn spinner, to engage in a very American metaphor. Here is what I think may be the most relevant paragraph, after all the myth-making chatter:

"Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp."

Mr. Brooks is an authoritarian and as such he celebrates the martial spirit: competition,win, loose,boot camp: words that are indicative of the vulgarized Social Darwinism, the ethos of dog eat dog, that is all pervasive in the Conservative mentality and sensibility. One must read this essay as instructive of the political uses of that hyperbolic register, but here Mr. Brooks pushes to its very limits, all without a hint of irony, while approaching a baroque self-parody. This is a very particular accomplishment.
American Litterateur