'adjusted...to the most dubious mediocrity'

Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.* — What is the cause of the decline of German culture? That 'higher education' is no longer a privilege — the democratism of 'culture' made 'universal' and common. . . . Not to overlook the fact that military privileges absolutely compel too great attendance at higher schools, which means their ruin. — No one is any longer free in present-day Germany to give his children a noble education: our 'higher' schools are one and all adjusted — as regards their teachers, their curricula and their instructional aims — to the most dubious mediocrity.

*beauty is for the few 

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888; trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1968)