CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The evidence is unmistakable that there is an important change in the attitude of the public toward education. There is an increasingly general demand for it in some form or other. Everywhere and in all classes of society the interest in acquiring better knowledge is apparent.

In England and on the continent of Europe there are thousands of classes and groups patiently pursuing long and serious courses of study. American colleges and universities are crowded and many students are each year turned away. Vast and increasing numbers register annually for correspondence and university extension courses. The demand for more education is shown also in the increasing number of lecture courses, people’s colleges, and other centers of public discussion.

While people do not always know just what it is they demand and frequently the thing which they receive is not education, nevertheless there is a new and very wide-spread interest. This new interest shows itself not only in the increasing number of persons engaged in some kind of educational activity but also in the fact that people are beginning to see that education properly may be extended into adult life.

Until recently, people have thought of education as something for children, something which a man either got or missed in his early years, something which he generally forgot in his mature years. To the average person, education was a matter of fond memories or of unpleasant associations with teachers, school houses and experiences of childhood. The “highly” educated person was the exceptional person in the community, discussions of the philosophy of education did not appeal to a wide public interest. Now higher branches of learning are being pursued by numbers of people outside regular educational institutions. Something very significant is happening. Perhaps at no time since the thirteenth century has the desire for knowledge so nearly approached a mass movement.

Certain qualifications must however be made. While much of the demand for education is genuine and spontaneous, much of it is spurious, irrelevant, inconsequential. The increased attendance at school or university does not necessarily mean that more education is going on. It is frequently said that our colleges are crowded with inferior students. Athletics, fraternities, schools of business and the automobile tend to displace science and the classics. American youth has acquired its ideal of college life from the motion pictures. We should not infer from the large numbers engaged in adult education that democracy has suddenly decided to rid itself of intellectual shoddiness. If the advertisements of correspondence courses in self-improvement which regularly appear in the popular magazines are an indication of the instruction offered for sale, people might better spend their money for patent medicine or in having their fortunes told. At best adult education consists largely of brief courses of a vocational nature. Even worker’s education, a movement which has inspired hope in many liberals, may easily be over estimated. Much of it is little more than a recrudescence of antiquated radical propaganda, designed to enable the proletariat to “emancipate itself from the slavery of capitalism,” and to get it “ready for a millennial industrial democracy.” The initiative often comes not from studious minded workers, but from enthusiastic intellectuals and idealistic uplifters. The cultural gesture is often pathetic or comic. It is not uncommon for those who have completed the courses of study in a “workers” college to find themselves more unadjusted than they were before.

It is sought to make of adult education something which will broaden the interests and sympathies of people regardless of their daily occupation--or along with it--to lift men’s thought out of the monotony and drudgery which are the common lot, to free the mind from servitude and herd opinion, to train habits of judgment and of appreciation of value, to carry on the struggle for human excellence in our day and generation, to temper passion with wisdom, to dispel prejudice by better knowledge of self, to enlist all men, in the measure that they have capacity for it, in the achievement of civilization.

Adult education is a way of living which should be open to all who care for it for its own sake. It is not surprising that it frequently fails of its true aims. Education has always been regarded as a mere means to ends that have nothing to do with it. It is to be expected, therefore, that education in our day should be regarded primarily as a means of entrance to the already overcrowded professions, or to material gain or better social position. Doubtless it must remain so until the community becomes sufficiently civilized so that some degree of liberal education is the expected thing in all classes, an interest and a goal, a spiritual bond of union somewhat like the idea of catholic religion in the middle ages. This is an ideal which will not be realized by magic. There is no cheap popular substitute for education. Nor are we nearing the goal while as now almost anything passes for education.

Almost any method of salesmanship or trick of influencing people for any ends whatever is now “education.” Every one educates the public. It is marvelous how large a portion of the population of these states is qualified to instruct. Education has become the game men perpetually work to convert their neighbors. It is the cure for every social ill. How shall we put an end to the crime wave, abolish war, how to prevent social revolution,--or bring revolution about, how induce unwilling people to accept cheerfully the coercion of national prohibition or give lip service to some one’s favorite brand of patriotism? The answer is in all cases--education. If you are engaged in increasing the sale of a certain soap, in putting everyone on guard against that social disability of which one’s best friend will not tell him, if you can frighten a multitude with the danger of pyorrhea and thus increase your profit in tooth paste--all this is now called education.

Many see in the general movement for more education a great hope for humanity. It was the belief in its political benefits that led to the compulsory education of children in the nineteenth century. Men were sure that all that held the world back was ignorance. People would surely wish to have their ignorance removed. Remove it, teach men the laws of a reasonable and beneficent nature, and mankind in general would be wise and happy and good. Ingersoll used to rejoice whenever he visited a town where the schoolhouse was larger than the church.

As the humanitarians of the nineteenth century held that public school education must inevitably put an end to tyranny and superstition, so many of our contemporaries look upon adult education as the guarantor of a new and better civilization. There is to be an end of bigotry and partisan strife and of crowd hysteria and of the vulgarities which beset democracy. They see genius appreciated, a selection by the masses of a sincere and competent leadership. Men everywhere are to learn “not only how to make a living, but how to live.”

Finally, it is hoped that adult education will give us new methods and aims which will be carried back into our schools and colleges and transform them. A better informed adult population will naturally take a more active and intelligent interest in the education of youth. And when teachers try to instruct adults it will become necessary for them to make their teaching interesting and significant. The teachers will also learn something about life, gleaning sheaves of ripe wisdom out of the mature experience of their students; they will become better teachers. All this may or may not come to pass. The point of interest is that there is this tendency to make a gospel of education.

We Americans have a weakness for new gospels. They are a pleasant form of verbal exercise. Liberty, Democracy, Social Reform, the Cause of Labor, Psychoanalysis--all have been put to such evangelistic use. Now we are to become an educated nation by the simple process of everyone educating everyone else. Education is like reform, it is something which is always good for other people. There is much talk about adult education and there are many conferences. But I have not attended a conference for the discussion of this subject in which anyone spoke of adult education as his own pursuit of knowledge. And as with most gospels, we are in such a hurry to save souls that we would begin proclaiming the new salvation to the nation before pausing to find out what education is.

Education has one thing in common with religion. One must come to it with clean hands and a pure heart or one can never know the secret power of it. This is as true of a nation as of an individual. As a people we have certain traits which may be praiseworthy in themselves, but are distinctly hostile to the work of education. I will enumerate them and then briefly indicate their element of hostility. They are, first, our genius for organization; second, our well-known utilitarianism; third, our cleverness in finding shortcuts to the ends we seek; and fourth, our tendency to make propaganda.

The American way of doing things is to proceed to organize them. Our genius for organization is probably our most generally recognized national characteristic. It has given us such prestige as we enjoy among the nations of the earth. Ours is the land of the Woolworth Building, the Ford factories, the Anti-saloon League, Rotary, the Ku Klux Klan, and the college cheer leader. In organization there is power and there is efficiency, as seen in the success of our industries. Labor, politics, morals, religion, charity have all followed the same course. In fact a man gains recognition in this country only by virtue of his membership in some power-seeking group. He who remains unorganized is lost. And without a chairman, a committee, an executive secretary and a press agent no human interest can survive. We simply do not know what to do with it or how to think about it.

Organization, which is instrument or means, tends to become an end in itself. This is the fate of most organized causes; a movement arises with its standardized labels and values, its stereotyped mannerisms, its rigamarole. Success is estimated in terms of material effects, tangible results, numbers and power. The organizer takes precedence over those who possess the interest which it is his task to serve. When a man becomes a labor organizer, he stops work. Many university presidents are not themselves teachers or even scholars. They are good organizers, and with very much the same methods and standards of value one could as well organize a labor union or an insurance company. This is no criticism of the college president. His practical ability is requisite of modern conditions. But ways of thinking and of feeling are elusive and essentially personal, and when the attempt is made to institutionalize them they vanish and a lifeless imitation is substituted. You may as well try to organize the weather as to organize faith, hope and love. “Organized charity” is almost a contradiction in terms. Organized religion is a garden of artificial flowers, badly faded too. The spiritual life of the race was carefully weeded out long ago.

To know the effect of organization upon education, one need only attend a convention of the National Educational Association, or familiarize oneself with the public school system anywhere. The system supplants education. The present interest in adult education is in part a protest against the system. The thirst for knowledge is nowhere more genuine and healthy than in such groups as those which attend The People’s Institute of New York and other educational centers where learning is pursued with a minimum of organization. In such places people who desire further knowledge of some subject in which they are interested come together, voluntarily, and their only basis of association is their common intellectual interest. There is no cult or “movement”; there are no promoters for there is nothing to promote. There are no ulterior ends to serve and there are no outside influences or regulations save those necessary to insure honest scholarship and competent instruction. Many adult students would resent any attempt at further organization.

There is in existence at the present time a World Association for adult education, and there was recently formed an American Association. But these associations have no ambition to guide or control or to standardize. Nor are they equipped to do so. One of the greatest services that such an association, made up of teachers and students, could perform would be to work to prevent the diversion of the present interest in popular education to ends that are not educational.

“Adult Education” is becoming a slogan, a phrase to capitalize, a label to attach to various activities which have hitherto borne other brands,--Americanization for instance, or social work, or community organization, or reforms and propagandas of one sort or another. Much that is now labeled Adult Education has a curiously familiar look. There are faces one has seen before somewhere in other climes that then enjoyed the sunshine of popular interest. Praiseworthy enterprises no doubt, and not less praiseworthy is the somewhat tardy discovery that the organizers have all along been speaking the prose of adult education without knowing it.

The danger is that persons with long experience in promoting and administering many things may also conceive of each educational task as primarily one of organization. In a recent conference on adult education in a New England state, an enthusiastic public school administrator in a burst of oratory proposed that adult education be made compulsory. Another called attention to the appalling extent of illiteracy, particularly as regards the use of the English language, and urged that adult education be promoted as a preventive of crime. A third, a dean in an eastern college, insisted that adult education at once be departmentalized; graded, I suppose, into its primary, secondary, collegiate and post-graduate branches. Nothing has yet been said about an adult kindergarten, though doubtless many people could profit by attending such an institution. Perhaps the associated kindergartens have not yet discovered the fact that they also have been engaged in adult education.

We shall be disappointed if it is our hope to send the grown-up population of the country back to Public School to receive still more of the thing that caused many of them to leave. One of the leading educators in America recently asked a group of teachers whether any among them were so well satisfied with what they had accomplished in their own sphere that they could wish to extend their work through the adult years.

It is very difficult for the man of the system to think of education itself, he is too much preoccupied with gradations, requirements, discipline, reports, with seeing that a given minimum of identical work is done by all in a given time. He thinks in terms of buildings and equipment, submission to authority, conformity to herd opinion, service to the state. All or at least some of these things are necessary, but it is obvious that they do not constitute an education. This lesson America has got to learn. There can be no quantity production of the things of the spirit.

Another national trait which influences our education is our utilitarianism. I do not use this term in the sense that it was used by those philosophers who held the principle of the Greatest Happiness. I refer to that in us which is spoken of as “Yankee shrewdness.” Except in politics and religion, we are a sensible people. And by sensible I mean--and most Americans would agree--practical. We can be very efficient when we wish to,--that is, when there is anything to gain by it. We are straightforward, and except in matters concerning which we prefer to deceive ourselves, not easily taken in. Whatever we profess, we are born pragmatists. Our first question about anything is ‘what good is it’, that is, what use is it? We demand results and we get them. We get things done because our philosophy of life is one of action, and our prevailing ethical standard is one of service. In the solution of a practical problem, and most problems to which we give our attention are practical, we pride ourselves on our directness. We come to the point. We dispense with the unnecessary, the ornamental, the traditional. It is a valuable trait.

But things sometimes have meanings other than that of usefulness. There are values which can not be measured in terms of money or personal advantage, or of time lost or gained, or of industrial efficiency. Health for instance is good not merely because the healthy man can do more work; it is good for its own sake. Yet people are frequently advised to guard their health for strictly economic reasons, and practical people have the habit of showing us the cost of disease, presenting statistics of labor-time lost, estimating the loss to the community as so many thousands of dollars annually.

I have known people to take a like utilitarian view of human relationships, making friends for the sake of commercial and social advancement, furnishing their houses, selecting their motor cars and even their clothes with the view to keeping up their credit at the bank. Many a man openly says that he belongs to certain clubs, and sometimes one even joins a church, for business reasons. How much the practical man misses is evident from the fact that it never occurs to him that there are other reasons for doing these things.

Practical men love to philosophize about the value of education. When I was a student I once rode up to the college with a farmer who was passing the campus on his way home from town. He informed me in no uncertain terms that he had no use for that institution. It irritated him to see all those “young loafers” wasting their time learning Latin and Greek and lawn tennis. Not one of them, not even the faculty, knew how to do anything; he had recently tested them out. He had asked the professor of Greek how many feet of lumber could be sawed from a log twenty-three inches in diameter and twenty feet long, and the professor did not know.

The farmer’s point of view is now that of many modern institutions of learning. Educators are determined to give people the knowledge they need for success in life and work. Courses are offered in scenario writing, millinery, salesmanship. Whether courses are anywhere offered in paper hanging--with credit toward the bachelor’s degree, I do not know. But it is held that as thinking is really part of acting, only that knowledge is real which can be put in operation. There is a truth in this statement if one takes a sufficiently broad view of activity. But the tendency is to make an easy and crude distinction between knowledge which is useful, and that which is merely “ornamental.” This distinction does not always hold. Knowledge may be like art, it may have values which are more than use or ornamentation. Dr. Horace Kallen divides values into economic values and æsthetic values. Economic goods are those which are valuable because they are the means of getting some good other than themselves. Aesthetic goods are those which have value in themselves. Art is excellence. Education is the art of making living itself an art. It is the achievement of human excellence; it transcends both the useful and the ornamental. It is a way of life, just as truly as the religious life is a way of life, or the moral life, or the single life.

People motivated by a narrow utilitarianism do not really desire education. They are quite content with a vulgar substitute--if it pays. Education does not transform them; they tend to transform it after their own likeness. That many are seeking “education” from such motives is evident. One has only to study the advertising pages of the popular magazines to note the kind of appeal that is made to induce the ambitious to enroll in certain correspondence schools. The prospective student is given the promise that if he will subscribe for certain courses he may some day sit in the boss’s chair, and associate with the big men at the top who do real things. Usually there is an alluring picture of these big men at their desks, thinking great ideas; a picture which gives about the same notion of the lives of the successful as one sees in the motion pictures. Sometimes the picture is of two men one on either side of the manager’s desk. One stands meekly, hat in hand, dressed as a laborer. On his face are the marks of sorrow, humility, hunger. The other man has the look of the typical “go-getter.” The latter is seated; he is evidently giving an order. Such a picture is not intended to be a comment upon the inequalities of our industrial system. The reader is informed that both men started at the bottom, that one improved his mind and his opportunities, the other’s is a wasted life.

Such advertisements are typical, and are worthy of note because they indicate something of the nature of the prevailing American interest in education. Here is an illustration of a domestic scene: The man stands at the door dejected. He has just been discharged from his position, and has come home to tell his wife. She sympathetically replies that he ought long ago to have bought that course of lessons. Or she consoles him with the question, “Why is it that all the others have gone ahead and you have not?”

By contrast there is a series of invitations to enter the temple of knowledge in which a wife is portrayed leaning affectionately over her husband’s shoulder. He holds a pay envelope in his hand and says, “I am making real money now.” It is well, when telling people of the advantages of education, to give them an idea of the conversation which takes place in the homes of the cultured.

But that anyone should seriously enter upon a course of study of the world’s classics in order that he may impress people with his knowledge, appear genteel, make himself attractive to women or gain entrance to an exclusive social set, is, I believe, a distinctly modern contribution to educational theory. There recently came into my possession half a shelf of little old books bound in leather. They contain a translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, some novels of Fielding and Smollet, and a book or two of seventeenth century religious meditations. The volumes are discolored with age and are worn with much reading, broken bindings are carefully repaired with hand stitching and torn pages pasted together by someone who prized and reverenced their content. They are part of the small library of a New England farmer of the early years of the Republic, who read his books by his kitchen fireside when the day’s work was done, who lived with them for years, and found in them a perpetual source of interest and wisdom and a refuge in an existence of loneliness and toil. Imagine anyone trying to sell that man a work of art with the promise that a casual reading of it would enable him to appear more cultivated than he really was.

Today a much advertised and in fact admirable selection of classic literature is offered with precisely this appeal. A full page display appears in the Sunday papers depicting a gaudy dining-room with three people conventionally dressed for dinner seated at the table. There are two men and a beautiful woman. She is talking to the man on her right, and is evidently fascinated with his brilliant conversation. The man on the left sits dumb and miserable and unnoticed; he can not join in such sophisticated and scintillating discussion. We are informed that the poor man has neglected to read his fifteen minutes a day. It is to this sort of thing that popular utilitarianism, aided and appealed to by commercialism, would divert a hesitating interest in education.

Even in the best of educational institutions the utilitarian point of view with its emphasis upon a narrow efficiency has its dangers. It is the source of that specialization which crams the student’s head full of information concerning one subject, leaving him in ignorance of all else and hence unable to gain a proper perspective of the knowledge that he does possess.

In “Science and the Modern World,” Whitehead says

“The modern chemist is likely to be weak in zoölogy, weaker still in his general knowledge of the Elizabethan drama, and completely ignorant of the principles of rhythm in English versification. It is probably safe to ignore his knowledge of ancient history. Of course I am speaking of general tendencies; for chemists are no worse than engineers, or mathematicians, or classical scholars. Effective knowledge is professionalised knowledge, supported by a restricted acquaintance with useful subjects subservient to it.

This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove. Each profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove. Now to be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of abstractions. The groove prevents straying across country, and the abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is paid. But there is no groove of abstraction which is adequate for the comprehension of human life....

The dangers arising from this aspect of professionalism are great, particularly in our democratic societies. The directive force of reason is weakened. The leading intellects lack balance. They see this set of circumstances, or that set; but not both sets together. The task of coordination is left to those who lack either the force or the character to succeed in some definite career.... The point is that the discoveries of the nineteenth century were in the direction of professionalism, so that we are left with no expansion of wisdom and with greater need of it. Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development. It is this balanced growth of individuality which it should be the aim of education to secure.”

A philosophy which reduces learning to mere efficiency, makes of education only a means to something other than personal development. It sees each good as an economic good, a means only, making everything exist only for the sake of something else to be obtained. But there are goods which exist for their own sakes and one such good is human excellence.

In the words of Dr. L. P. Jacks, “The civilization of power aims at the _exploitation of the world_, which is thought of as a dead or mechanical thing, existing that men may exploit it. That of culture aims at the _development of man_, thought of as a citizen of a universe which can be loved, enjoyed and reverenced: education being the name of the process which leads him to love, enjoy and reverence it.”

Another and even more serious danger is our passion for shortcuts. Business prospers by rapid turnover. Practical men demand quick results. We are an impatient people, always in a hurry. We have not time for the tedious labor processes necessary to produce well-made articles of handicraft. Consequently we have learned to be satisfied with hastily and cheaply made commodities which somewhat resemble the real articles and will do just as well--for the time being. Why should we not buy cheap furniture, when we expect to move every first day of October? Why not wear garments made of shoddy, when everyone knows the fashions will change even before shoddy can be worn threadbare? Why erect buildings that will stand for centuries in cities where everything is torn-down and rebuilt in a decade, and even churches move about following the shifting elements of the population which constitute their membership? Just why we are all moving about in such a hurry no one knows. Some people think that this restless haste is progress. Whether it is or not, it is certainly modern.

But something of the shoddiness enters into the minds and hearts of men, when shortcuts are sought in matters of mental growth which are essentially processes of slow maturing. Education requires time. The only time wasted is that spent trying to save time. There should be no haste or crowding or cramming. Mastery of any subject requires years of familiarity with it. The formal training one receives in an institution is but the introduction. Most people never get beyond a mere bowing acquaintance with knowledge.

A prominent American manufacturer, so we are told, once made the statement that if he wished to know anything he would employ an expert to tell him about it in five minutes. Among workers in adult education there is a demand for easy text books, primers which will give to people in a few pages and in words of one syllable the essentials of philosophy, psychology, literature and natural science. Simple and clear statement is always desirable. No author really knows his subject matter until he can “talk United States” in presenting it. But that is another story. People who can read nothing more profound than the tabloid papers are a menace to education. They only retard the progress of any class they enter.

Yet there is a wide demand for tabloid information. We like outlines of history, psychology, philosophy; primers of relativity; ABC’s of atoms. Such books have value only for the student who after reading them consults the original sources. But what people want is education without effort, ready-made education. I recently saw an advertisement in which there was offered for sale “a whole library in one volume.” Another advertisement offers “The Essentials of a Liberal Education; Twenty Centuries of thought on your Library Shelf,”--one shelf is all that is required! And in addition the publishers will provide you with “easy reading courses.”

The following example is typical of what happens to education when wisdom lifteth up her voice in the street. A full page advertisement appears in a Sunday newspaper. There is a picture of two successful business men looking at a newspaper. The article which has caught their attention reads, “R. P. Clark Made President of Big Mercantile Corp. Began as Office Boy 21 years ago.” Here are a few lines quoted from their comments,

“That fellow amazes me! Do you remember when he first came to us as an office boy?... and all the other fellows had a head start on him with their college degrees. He must have found an unusual way to make up for his lack of schooling--he must have found a secret means of improving his chances both in business and society. Clark knew how tremendously he was handicapped by his lack of schooling and he determined to find _a shortcut to education_. And this he found in Elbert Hubbard’s Famous Scrapbook.”

There you have it. I have never seen a more complete statement of the average man’s idea of education. Mastery of the tricks which bring early success; belief that there is somewhere a secret magic, knowledge of which will immediately transform one’s personality;--the shortcut. No appreciation of the fact that it is never information which transforms a person, but the persistent effort put forth to acquire it. Education is on the air, in these enlightened times one can get it anywhere--like bootleg whiskey. It is proposed now to give adult education by radio. All you need do to achieve scholarship is to turn it on, close your eyes, and go to sleep. You can get it without effort, without knowing that you are getting it, or just who is educating you.

I mentioned earlier that one of the dangers to education in America is our weakness for propaganda. Few people know the difference between education and advertising. The latter is commonly spoken of as education by those engaged in it. I once knew an advertising manager for a fruit grower’s organization. He conceived a brilliant idea. Just as we have Health Week, Clean-Up Week, Fire Prevention Week, he arranged in various localities an Orange Eating Week. He told me that he could educate the public to eat as many oranges as he chose. Press agents are everywhere busy “educating the public” for all sorts of objects; to respect the rights of vested capital, to give money to build cathedrals, to vote a straight party ticket. I once attended a banquet given by an organization of manufacturers. There I met a splendid-looking elderly gentleman and was told that he was the attorney for the organization. As I had never before seen him, I inquired if he had offices in New York. My informant said, “Oh, no, he lives in Washington. His job is to educate Congress.”

In spite of all this popular interest, or perhaps because of it, the cause of education is in a bad way. It is dangerous to encourage people to think they are educated when they are not, or to believe they are acquiring it when they are in fact getting something else. Much that passes for adult education serves only to make people more superficial and opinionated than they were before. It is very doubtful if the general level of our intellectual life has been raised by such knowledge as the public has gained. The public can read and we have with us the Hearst papers and the tabloids. Literacy has placed the bulk of the population daily at the mercy of the propagandist and the press agent. With libraries and colleges and high schools everywhere, and after a century of science, vast sections of the population can be swept by such movements as the Ku Klux Klan and Fundamentalism. State after state prohibits the teaching in its schools of such scientific knowledge as will lead to a belief in evolution. Crazy reform, fantastic religious innovation, political foolishness and unbalanced partisanship may at any time sweep over the country. Intelligence in this country makes a poor showing in competition with quackery and complacent ignorance for popular leadership.

It is common to lay the blame for the present state of affairs at the door of the schools and colleges. Without doubt they must accept some measure of responsibility in the matter. In many instances the only alternative to a general slump in standards of scholarship has been a narrow academic pedantry. There has been much yielding to the pressure of popular prejudice, much display of conventional morality as a cover for second-rate educational activity. Faculties are well aware how little a student may know and get through college. The colleges themselves seem to have participated in the general cheapening of education by their generosity in granting honorary degrees. Almost any one who is successful in business or prominent in politics becomes a “Doctor.” Erasmus in the fifteenth century, even though he had already become probably the leading classical scholar of his times, studied and taught at Paris for nine years before he was granted his doctor’s degree. When the late Mr. Bryan threatened to print all his college degrees on his card, in answer to the repeated statement that he was an ignoramus, the joke was really on the colleges.

But too much is demanded of institutions of learning. Large numbers of students come to them with no background of cultural tradition, and they return to an environment which is distinctly hostile to intellectual pursuits. The public clamor that some one educate us in spite of ourselves is only another way of shouting, “We have piped unto you and ye have not danced.” The ultimate responsibility for the condition of education rests upon the average members of society, and it is reducible to a moral factor. Carlyle once said that people could only be taken in by quacks when they had a certain element of quackery in their own souls. When multitudes regard education merely as a shortcut to financial success, or as a device for appearing to be something they are not, or as an instrument for converting others to their own partisan beliefs, they will of course get the “education” they desire.

Once I thought that ignorance was an innocent thing, a sort of spiritual vacuum passively waiting to be filled with precious truths. Except in children ignorance is by no means an innocent thing. It is a very active element in human life. We must overcome strong resistances before we may begin to learn some things. We keep ourselves in ignorance because there are facts and truths whose existence we prefer not to admit. The man who strives to educate himself--and no one else can educate him--must win a certain victory over his own nature. He must learn to smile at his dear idols, analyze his every prejudice, scrap if necessary his fondest and most consoling belief, question his presuppositions, and take his chances with the truth. The greater the need of education, the stronger the resistance to it.

Whether the present increase of interest in education is to be an empty gesture depends upon whether the thing demanded is really education. There is no one right way, and certainly each age with its special needs and peculiar industrial and cultural environment should make its own contribution to educational achievement. But there is something which belongs to no special time and to all times, a way of approaching our tasks or valuing experiences. No one who is merely a creature of his own times is really educated. There is conceivable a world in which,--great as are the historical accidents that separate them--a Socrates, or a Plato, or a Cicero, or an Erasmus, a Voltaire, a Goethe, a Huxley would be at home. Much as they differ, there is yet something, which the educated have in common, a quality of spirit, something that may not be defined, but that right-minded people recognize. We shall strive from various avenues of approach to envisage it, for to miss it is to miss all. It is the meaning of a liberal education.