The decline and fall of classical education signify a hidden group hatred of the tensions affiliated with the higher powers of the mind; they express social and historical tension-evasion, a thirst for inertia, and entropic decline. But isn't aversion to work ordained by entropy? The author concedes that we enrich our minds for the same reason we ignore or distort distressing realities: to evade tensions, or at least our awareness of them. Yet all evasions are not equal. Some are cheap: the effort they require-- the few neural depolarizations required to momentarily misdirect attention--is trivial compared to the magnitude of the tensions (such as panic or self-loathing) they instantly obliterate. Paideia is expensive: The effort it requires--decades of solitary study and reflection--is more commensurate with the tensions (panic, perhaps, or self-loathing) these toilsome "evasions" were intended to minimize. For example, delusion is cheaper than the recognition and active modification of the painful inner or outer reality the delusion replaced with so little expenditure of mental effort. When the university discarded its compulsory classical curricula in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it performed, on behalf of the people, a cheap evasion. In this article the author explores the question: What, exactly, does modern society "think" it wants from higher education?