CHAPTER II

LIBERAL EDUCATION VS. ANIMAL TRAINING

In a sense no living person is yet educated, for the learning process is never completed. But there must come a time when the process results in some differences in behavior. Often these differences seem to be small and irrelevant, amounting merely to added social grace or more correct use of language. Something more than this must differentiate the educated from the uneducated or so much human energy would not be expended in the effort to get education.

When we inquire what the difference is, we find there is much confusion. In the process of education knowledge is acquired. Many a person’s education consists of what he has learned. May one possess much knowledge or information and remain uneducated? I know a physician who has great skill and wide professional information, yet he is essentially vulgar in his tastes and enjoyments and bigoted in his human relationships, and his judgments concerning most things are narrow and hasty and are determined largely by passion and prejudice. You feel that his learning has never become integrated with his personality. It is a property annexed to his estate over which he is an absentee landlord. It has made no changes in his general habits of thought and behavior.

There are people whom no one would think educated, who yet have an astounding amount of information. They know all about race horses, or bridge, or baseball scores, or stocks and bonds. Many have a knowledge of such things which may be greater both in range and accuracy than that which some professional scholars have of their special subjects.

Shall we say then that some kinds of knowledge have educational value and that others have not? But why should not all knowledge be equally education? Is there a psychological reason for the alleged difference or is the exclusion of some kinds of knowledge the result merely of a conventional attitude? Our discussion of education resolves itself into a philosophical problem.

The issue of practical education versus the so-called cultural comes up whenever people are interested in the subject. Partisans of the latter type of learning are inclined to look down upon the former. They say it is not education but only skill and efficiency. They hold that education is scholarship and properly has to do with such subjects as the classics, the humanities, philosophy, etc., which discipline the mind and ennoble the spirit. This is the traditional view.

Those who take the opposite view ask what earthly purpose can useless and sequestered learning serve? They are suspicious of education for “refinement” or the “genteel tradition.” Is it not the aim of the pursuit of knowledge to enable one to do something, to attain mastery, to equip the mind to function well in an environment which demands activity of us all? Is not anything well learned culture? An excellent statement of this point of view can be found in Huxley’s lectures on education.

There has been much discussion of this question in the universities and colleges. There are those who deplore the decline of interest in the classics and philosophy. They say that institutions of higher learning are becoming mere “intellectual cafeterias,” that the change from classical education to an elective system embracing all sorts of vocational courses is a distinct loss, inasmuch as the knowledge so acquired lacks coordination and balance, while specialization crowds out the general and cultural subjects that form the foundation of education.

On the other hand, why should not a University teach anything that people wish to know? There was once resistance to including the sciences, chemistry and physics and biology. The liberalizing effect and cultural value of these subjects is now recognized, and their usefulness is a social gain. Then why not domestic science, agriculture, mechanics, business methods? What is wrong with the schools of business at Harvard and Columbia?

A similar issue exists in secondary education. It is often said that high schools pay too much regard to college entrance requirements, since only a small portion of graduates expect to continue their education. The students have gained only a most superficial introduction to the classics and have learned nothing practical. Schools of trade, commerce, and of technology are increasing in number and the movement for such training is guided by principles of education very different from those of the classical tradition.

Those of us who are interested in adult education meet the same problem. Writing of worker’s education Dr. Horace M. Kallen says,

“... The complexity of the tasks of any union official has grown so great, their variety so considerable, that it is no longer possible for an official merely to pass from the worker’s bench to the official’s desk and completely discharge his duties.... Schools would have to be provided analogous to the schools of business administration maintained in the colleges.... Out of the instruction there would in the course of time emerge a communicable permanent record, on which the necessary accessories of books could be built. Such a school of officials would be a nucleus from which the educational process could ultimately radiate into every shop.

“Labor education would finally thus become conversant with control rather than escape. In such a conversancy more and more of the energies now seeking relief in the vapors of the social mechanisms of escape, would find satisfactory enchannelment in the technique of control.

“It is the essential function of labor education to envisage, to forecast and to enable this transition. The various arts would then develop no longer as compensations against, but as expressions and prophetic fulfillments, as criticisms and mitigations of, the processes of this movement; they too would more largely be coterminous with industrial life.”

Dr. Kallen would probably not go so far as to say that the sole aim of Labor Education is to equip the members of the working class with such knowledge as will enable them to master the industrial environment and change the social system. But there are those who hold such a view, just as there are those who hold that the worker should receive only such education as will make him a more competent workman. Both views, one held by extreme radicals, the other by conservative capitalists, have in common the belief that education for workers is purely practical training. “Cultural” subjects are sometimes studied, and there is a lively demand for them, but the tendency is to regard this interest as an “escape” from reality into a world of fanciful contemplation and mere verbal exercise. It is an intellectual luxury, a form of entertainment or inspiration to which a worker is entitled, but it is an interest which is a little under suspicion of being “bourgeois.”

Hence in all phases of education, this issue is debated. The issue is inevitable in a time like the present, with a classical tradition surviving in an industrial civilization. Have we any need in the modern world of cultural traditions which have their origin in antiquity? Should we or could we dispense with all educational values except those which are coterminous with the present industrial situation?

Wherever such an issue arises, I have learned to suspect both sides. As a rule both are based upon a common presupposition which is an error. Here the presupposition is that the important factor in education is the question what is to be taught, rather than the spirit of learning itself. Education is conceived of as knowledge acquired. Attention is fixed not on the learning process through which an individual becomes reoriented to his world, but upon the end result, something fixed and done, a certain amount of information stored up. Is this what we mean by learning? Is it receiving and memorizing a given something either cultural or practical? Or is it an adventure in any kind of truth-seeking which changes the quality of one’s future experience and enables one to behave not merely efficiently but wisely, with a broad view and a sympathetic understanding of the many ways in which men have striven to create meaning and value out of the possibilities of human life? If this last is correct, the real question is not what shall be learned but how and why and to what end. Is learning a venture in spiritual freedom that is humanism, or is it a routine process of animal training? Both cultural and practical knowledge may be reduced to animal training--and they generally are. It is there that the issue between them arises.

To my mind, an educated person is not merely one who can do something, whether it is giving a lecture on the poetry of Horace, running a train, trying a lawsuit, or repairing the plumbing. He is also one who knows the significance of what he does, and he is one who cannot and will not do certain things. He has acquired a set of values. He has a “yes” and a “no,” and they are his own. He knows why he behaves as he does. He has learned what to prefer, for he has lived in the presence of things that are preferable. I do not mean that he is merely trained in the conventions of polite society or the conformities of crowd morality. He will doubtless depart from both in many things. Whether he conforms or not, he has learned enough about human life on this planet to see his behavior in the light of a body of experience and the relation of his actions to situations as a whole. Such a person is acquiring a liberal education and it makes little difference whether he has been trained in philosophy or mechanics. He is being transformed from an automaton into a thinking being.

The antithesis of liberal education and practical training arises in part out of a misunderstanding on both sides of a principle stated in Aristotle’s “Politics.” In this book there is set forth the philosopher’s theory of education. He is seeking for his times just what our practical educators seek for ours--to train youth to deal masterfully with existing conditions. Unlike many moderns he sees that such training applies to the whole personality. This is evident for example in his discussion of music where he considers the general psychological effects of various kinds of rhythm.

There were three important facts in the environment of the Greek youth to which the educator had to assist the student to adapt himself. The way in which the intelligent person faced these facts was the meaning of liberal education in Aristotle’s time. There was first a psychological fact. Popular myth was ceasing to function as an explanation of the processes of nature and as a basis for the control of behavior. Fortunately for the Greeks, no priestly class had gained control of their spiritual life. Stories of the doings of the gods were coming to be regarded as mere poetry, in the modern sense of the term. Philosophers did not hesitate to subject religious beliefs to the judgment of reason. The assertion had been made that “Man is the measure of all things.” A spirit of intellectual freedom prevailed that was unique in ancient times, I might say in any time. There was a disposition to investigate, to classify natural phenomena, to speculate upon their nature and causes. Men were faced with the necessity of thinking their experience through to find meanings which elsewhere were a matter of myth and folkway. Thought must be clarified and made exact if behavior was to be guided by reason. Philosophy, which included the beginnings of science, and education were almost the same thing,--the search for the good life. I will discuss this point further in a later lecture.

The second fact concerning which the Greek youth must learn to behave intelligently was political in its nature. It was the existence of an aristocratic democracy in which as a citizen he must participate with important results for both himself and the state. The free citizen must have learned to judge what is good.

The third fact which challenged the educator was sociological; it was the existence of slavery. This institution, which in the end was one of the causes of the breakdown of ancient civilization, seemed to be perfectly natural to the philosopher. Aristotle thinks that some people are slavish by nature. He has no thought of educating such persons, though they may be trained to perform their tasks well. All should be so trained that they may live happily and well in the stations in life where they are. As most mechanical labor was performed by slaves, and by hirelings whose social status was not very different from that of the slave, the Greeks candidly despised mechanic arts. Knowledge of them was thought to be a slavish kind of skill. Aristotle likewise looked down upon trade and commerce as debasing the mind, just as hard labor was thought to demean the body. The free man must be so trained that his privileges, his leisure and authority over others would make for general human happiness. This education of the free man was called “Liberal Education.” It was the education of a leisure class. It was a training for leadership and responsibility: not a mere initiation into the idealogy of an exploiting class, together with the passwords current in exclusive circles. Neither did it mean--at least for the ancient Greek--the accumulation of dead and inconsequential knowledge the only purpose of which was a pedantic display of erudition. In ages that followed, the study of the classics tended to become something of this sort. But this tendency marked a decline, a loss of the spirit of liberal education as it had once existed. Athenian education, in spite of the institution of slavery, developed men of wisdom and nobility of spirit and civilization of interest in such numbers that ancient Greece became the pioneer of western civilization and has remained the inspiration and guide to men in most of their efforts to attain a life of reason and beauty.

The fact that the liberal tradition had its origin in a society in which slavery prevailed has left traces in education which persist even to the present time. It is one of the things that cause people to believe that there are different types of education proper to different social strata. Education becomes a mark of distinction. It is for the privileged few. It is itself a privilege and a kind of vested interest. There is a higher knowledge and a lower knowledge. In part this distinction goes back to primitive times. In early civilization, everyone learned to do everything which the people of the tribe could do. There was no specialization; all alike learned to fish, to hunt, to fight, to dance. The primitive magic was associated with every human interest and every form of activity, and for every type of performance there was a magic formula. In time it became the special function of the elders and medicine men to remember the formulae and pass them on to their successors. Knowledge of the formulae became the special privilege of the priestly class. Knowledge of labor processes remained with the mass. The former was higher knowledge and developed into ancient wisdom. In certain religions it led to an esoteric intellectualism. The distinction gains emphasis among peoples like the Hebrews, Moslems and Christians whose religion is the “Religion of the Book.” The “Higher Knowledge” is now a divine revelation preserved in the Sacred Book. With each of the peoples mentioned religious scholarship becomes the basis of all learning, and dominates education. Any accretions of general culture which are acquired and added to theology, become tinctured by it. A priestly tradition is mingled with the classic culture as the philosophy of Aristotle becomes elaborated first by the Arabs, and then by the Rabbis and Christian scholars of the Middle Ages. What Aristotle meant simply as the training of the free man in self-mastery, in time became a professionalized “higher learning,” a sequestered scholarship largely unrelated to the existing environment.

Mediæval education became scholasticism. It was still a higher knowledge set apart from other interests: it did not include proficiency in the arts of industry, but rather in book learning and in disputation. Liberal it was not, though it still in a sense had to do with leisure. The good life had become one of pious contemplation. Aristotle’s free citizen was displaced by the cenobite and the candidate for holy orders. The life of Reason became one of skill in the formal logic with which a given system of life and thought was elaborated. Scholastic education made possible a high type of scholarship; it carried very far its training in the subtleties of argument. But it exhausted itself in a world of abstractions which it mistook for realities. It was a discipline, not a voyage of discovery. It was a matter of routine learning by memorizing. Its aim was to mold the mind of the student to a fixed type. It placed him in an environment so manipulated as to determine his habits of thinking once for all, to give support to required beliefs. It was education by indoctrination. It developed a type of mind which could be depended on to do and say the expected thing on the expected occasion, one which would hold certain desired convictions and no others. For such an educational system, learning was accepting and retaining something provided in advance. In this sense it was passive. Mentality was the product of environment. Scholastic education though it dealt with “things of the spirit” was from one point of view “animal training.”

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the scholars of the Renaissance turned from theological education to human letters. A revival of interest in the literature of antiquity became a sort of passion. Those who sought through the study of Greek and Latin poets, essayists, and philosophers to revive the spirit of the lost pagan civilization were called Humanists. They had a philosophy of education very different from that of scholasticism which was at that time on the decline. There was the promise that education might again become liberal, in the sense I use the term. Wherever the “New Learning” was carried it had a liberalizing influence. It roused the hostility of “obscurantists” and created a jolly row in many institutions of learning. It awakened pagan ideas throughout Italy, even in high ecclesiastical circles. It was bringing “refinement” to France. It was receiving something of a triumph in Northern Europe under the leadership of Erasmus, when the Reformation again turned general interest to theology. What the result of this humanistic movement in education might have been had it gone on unchecked no one can say. No one now believes it could have been what its leaders expected. They tried to produce an imitation in their own times of the manners and ways of men who had lived centuries earlier in a wholly different environment. Such an attempt of course is futile. But it is conceivable that as larger and larger numbers of people achieved freedom in the modern world a liberal education might have done in our day what the Greeks sought to do in theirs--lay the foundations of freedom in a well-considered basis of philosophy. In that event the whole of modern education might have been vitalized by a cultural tradition which could take into account the conditions under which modern men live and work without degenerating into narrow utilitarianism and mere mechanical efficiency.

What chiefly survived from the Renaissance--at least in Protestant countries--is the traditional education, in which the ancient classics are taught as tedious drill in language with the aim of improving the student’s literary style, also of disciplining his soul by compelling him to do something disagreeable, and finally so that he may be able to repeat a few Latin or Greek phrases, remember the names of a few ancient writers and perhaps if he has been very diligent, retain a sufficient number of vague memory traces to enjoy a book like Professor Erskine’s “Private Life of Helen of Troy.”

But to call this liberal education requires both humor and imagination. Little attempt is made to get behind the language into literary appreciation, or back of the literature to the ways and values of ancient life and the wisdom of the ages, or to see the relation of such wisdom to the problems of living in the modern world. Traditional education has again become an artificial thing, aloof from reality, a higher knowledge set apart by itself. That is, if one may call it knowledge at all. Most college graduates after a few years do not remember enough Latin to enable them to translate their own diplomas, so badly are the classics taught, even as mere language drill.

Much of the spirit of scholasticism, though little of its thoroughness and subtlety, persisted in the later Protestantism. Its influence necessarily tended to make this teaching of the humanities formal and innocuous. After the Renaissance, members of the nobility and gentry, and later an increasing number of the middle class, sought higher education for its refining influence, as an adornment rather than as a way of life. The result is a culture that is for the most part external to the sphere of our activities and interests, something borrowed, not won; seldom an expression or valuation or glorification of modern life. This also is a routine and a moulding to type. It is again a form of animal training.

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The development of science in the nineteenth century led to a demand for the education requisite for modern life. The application of science to industry created a new environment. New knowledge was required and new mental habits must be formed if there was to be effective control. Natural science gave men a new intellectual discipline and a new world-view. With it came a new hope for the race. Mankind need only learn the laws of nature and obey them to become wise and happy and good. The new knowledge dispelled ignorance and superstition and set the mind free. There was much criticism of traditional education, and much faith in the liberalizing effects of scientific training as well as in its practical results. Today scientific research occupies a most important place in education. In many colleges and universities it has almost supplanted the classical studies. No modern person can be really educated without some training in scientific methods.

But science also may become mere animal training. Each science is a profession, acquired as a technical training like learning a trade. Of things outside his own trade the scientist may be quite ignorant and lacking in curiosity. He is often unable to see the significance of his specialty for knowledge as a whole. Within his chosen field of study he may come to resent new discovery--especially if it fails to confirm some favorite theory. In some of the sciences, notably psychology, biology, medicine and the social sciences, there are intense partisan divisions, often rivalling in dogmatism and bitterness, those of theology. Each “school” develops its cult ideas, its jargon credo, and ritual. Herd opinion holds sway over scientists as over other men. Certain phrases and mannerisms are adopted, just as among Rotarians, because they show that one belongs to the crowd. The psychologist today, for instance, must boast his ignorance of philosophy and make a noise like a biologist. The advancement of knowledge is by no means the sole motive in scientific training; there is also much molding to type even though this latter objective is in conflict with the spirit of science itself.

Much contemporary educational philosophy is openly and avowedly a technique of animal training; so much so that it quite properly borrows its pedagogical principles from animal psychology. It would be difficult to over estimate the importance of animal experimentation for modern theories of education. Schools of education are deeply interested in the psychology of the learning process. Education is learning, and learning is habit formulation. Habits are the acquired modes of response of men and animals. They may be organized in the nervous tissue by any environmental factors which “condition” certain reflexes; that is, chain certain responses to given stimuli. It is possible for an animal experimenter or an educator of children to organize the environmental situation in such a manner that definite systems of desired responses may be regularly obtained whenever a stimulus of a certain kind is given. A simple and well-known experiment which will serve to explain what we mean by the conditioned reflex is that of Pavlov. A hungry dog when shown meat secretes saliva. At the time the dog sees the meat a bell is rung. This is repeated a number of times until the dog will secrete saliva at the sound of the bell, without the presence of the meat stimulus. The saliva response, induced by the bell stimulus, is the conditioned reflex.

It is said that all learning takes place after this fashion. An animal, a cat, may be placed in a cage, the door being so arranged that escape is possible only when the cat strikes a certain latch. After a period during which the cat makes all sorts of frantic random movements, the successful movement finally occurs and the cat escapes. The experiment is repeated and perhaps the period of futile activity will not be so long as at first. After a number of trials the cat will give up the random movements and at once unlock the door. The gradual shortening of the interval of time required for the desired response may be plotted. It is then called the animal’s “learning curve.”

Such curves may also be made of human learning processes. It is said that there is no essential difference between this animal learning and our own learning whether it be to swim or play tennis, or to memorize a poem, or solve a problem in algebra, or to master the technique of a profession. One’s education thus consists wholly of one’s organized systems of responses, or habit patterns. We speak of education as the development of personality. But from this point of view personality is nothing but the sum total of an individual’s conditioned reflexes:--that is, it is merely the manner in which the organism has been taught to work. One eminent Behaviorist among the psychologists compares personality to the running of a gas engine.

I will not enter upon a psychological discussion of this view of education, except to say that the method of animal training which is taken for granted is open to serious criticism. The theory proceeds on the assumption that _insight into the situation_ is not necessary to learning. The cat in the cage hits upon the successful gesture as a matter of pure chance. After a number of experiments, each said to place the animal in an identical situation, the successful action becomes “over determined,” and fixed as a habit. It is doubtful whether such training is learning at all. The animal--and conceivably the human being--need never take in the situation. The successful art, the more this learning process is perfected, degenerates into a mere gesture, related to the event in a purely external and arbitrary manner. It is difficult to see how educational methods guided by such a theory could do much to train the student in habits of independent judgment.

Professor Wolfgang Köhler spent four years studying the intelligence of apes at the anthropoid station in Tenerife. His experiments with these animals followed a procedure quite the reverse of that we have been discussing. He arranged his experiments so that there could be no chance and no routine, so that the situation as a whole implied a definite action on the part of the animal, an action which would be natural to it once it gained insight into the situation. From simple tasks he moved to more complex ones, always keeping the moment of insight as the crucial factor in the experiment. An ape is placed in a cage and fruit is put outside beyond the animal’s reach. A stick has also been placed within reach. After vain attempts to reach the fruit with its hand, the ape suddenly sits quietly looking the situation over: it looks from the fruit to the stick, then seizes the latter and pulls in the fruit. Later the animal is required to choose between a long stick and a shorter one, then two sticks are put within reach which must be joined before success may be attained.

From such tasks the animal is led on to those which finally test the limitations of its insight. So far as I know no use has yet been made of such psychological study of animal learning by our educators. But if we must resort to animal psychology in order to understand the processes of human learning it would seem that Köhler’s methods would be more suggestive to the educator than those which assume that the learner is throughout an automaton without understanding.

The so-called “new psychology” has filled modern education with confusion. Fads and fancies of all sorts prevail, each with its psychological jargon. “Progressive” experimental schools everywhere give voice to “modern ideas.” In many such schools there is a minimum of discipline, pupils are encouraged to take the initiative in all things, to study what they like, and when they choose. Everything is made as easy and as interesting as possible, and there is much talk about permitting the student to express himself and develop his personality. So long as we confine our attention merely to the methods of teaching we have the impression that this “new” education is anything but standardized. We get a different impression when we turn to examine the ideals of scholarship, the valuations, and general outlook on life which the newer philosophy of education accepts uncritically. In fact very little thought is given to these matters. The prevailing interests and trends of a democratic, industrial age are taken as the ultimate criteria. It might almost be said that education has come to be regarded merely as a function of the environment.

Now it is one thing to train a mind to deal effectively with its environment and to achieve some value in the modifications which it makes in that environment. It is a different thing to hold that mind is the product of the environment. A well-known psychologist says that the aim of his science is to predict and control behavior. He offers us the conditioned reflex as the means to any desired result, and says that if he could have full control of the environment of a given number of children, he would permit some one to select by lot the future life and career of each child, and he would form the mind of each according to the chosen pattern. Our modern environmentalists have more in common with mediæval scholasticism than they think. The aim of both is to produce an individual who will react under all circumstances according to a prearranged pattern.

Scholasticism, as we have seen, consisted chiefly of memory drill and training in logic and disputation. Law and theology were sometimes studied, but proficiency in such subjects does not in itself mean that a man has acquired a liberal education. He may only have learned to do the conventional trick when the expected signal is given, much like a trained dog in a circus. The same must be said of much modern professional training. The scholastic spirit haunts the legal mind to this day. Also it is possible--perhaps usual--for one to study medicine, and never once get an idea of what medicine means to the scientist. Most people educated by school teachers and college professors are in fact trained in this way. Think of what passes for moral and religious training. With respect to the most important questions in life, people have been so “conditioned” that they do not try to solve problems as they arise, but to say and do the expected thing on occasion. I once heard a professor in a theological seminary instruct his class in the art of visiting the sick. The students were busy copying in their note books the speeches which it is correct for a pastor to make on such occasions. The following is typical of such instruction. “As you enter the sick-room it is well to say When God puts a man down on his back, it is so that he may look up into Heaven.”

In such habit formation, learning is mere repetition. There is nothing of independence of judgment, no reflection on ends, no development of the capacity to deal with new situations. The better one is trained the more automatic one’s behavior becomes. And here we see the limitations to much so-called practical education,--“education for work and for life.”

Yes, but do we live simply to do things and to serve, to perform, however well, the tasks required by our times? Is all the world a stage, and are men merely actors who have learned well or poorly the lines written for them by someone else or dictated by necessity? And is there to be no understanding of the meaning of the part we play, or of the drama as a whole? Is no one through his education to contribute something original to the drama of life?

It seems to me that the animal training theory rests upon two presuppositions, both of which are wrong. The first is that the mind consists of what it has learned, that is, that it is the product of environment. This is really not a psychological doctrine, but a metaphysical assumption. It is the mechanist theory; an idea which works well as scientific method, but which leads to false conclusions when taken as a description of ultimate reality.

The second presupposition is a by-product of present-day industrial democracy. It is that education is a means to efficient service, with its rewards, getting on, general prosperity, etc. But is industry the end and aim of our existence? It is said that man if he is to be happy must be able to express himself in his work. I would not dispute this statement, but it is important to consider what it is that finds expression in one’s work. If work, in addition to being the means to some material end or bodily good, is also to be a form of self-expression, then the point of interest is the kind of selfhood, or quality of experience expressed. Then work exists for education, not education for work.

Something is possible to mankind, which transcends work and by which work itself is valued. As mere craftsmen we lose the sense of what good workmanship is and become the blind slaves of necessity or of desire the moment that education ceases to be the goal of labor. I do not mean merely that we learn by doing. That is the way animals learn and it is all they learn. By repeated performance an individual learns how to do a task, but he does not thereby learn what to do, nor why it is done. Education has to do with insight, with valuing, with understanding, with the development of the power of discrimination, the ability to make choice amongst the possibilities of experience and to think and act in ways that distinguish men from animals and higher men from lower. The ancients thought of education as the attainment of the virtues, wisdom, courage, temperance, justice. It is the pursuit of that knowledge which gives self-mastery. It is an interest which is never exhausted, but grows always broader and richer. It consists not in learning tricks but in developing ourselves. It is a victory won in some secret chamber of the mind which gradually transforms the whole personality and reveals itself as an indefinable quality in every word and act. It is a spiritual awakening; and if this awakening does not come, a person is not being educated however much he knows. I think it is the inability to win this psychological victory, or the disinclination to make the effort necessary to it, that accounts for the fact that some people cannot be educated. Though the change in the quality of the personality is indefinable, it is a very concrete fact in human life. Its presence is evident in the work of writers as different otherwise as Sir Thomas More, Galsworthy, Anatole France, Jonathan Edwards, Henry Adams, etc. There is a quality of the educated mind which may best be described as a kind of sincerity, and conversely the outstanding trait of ignorance is that of clever insincerity. The pathetic thing about the wrongly educated,--those who are trained merely to produce an effect, or get results, is that in the deeper human relationships they seldom know what sincerity is. Education is the antithesis of vulgarity.

Directly and immediately, it is useless. It is a kind of living which is of value for its own sake, a personal achievement which possesses intrinsic worth. It is not _for_ anything. To subject it to an ulterior end--citizenship, efficiency, the economic emancipation of the working class, increased income; or to educate people for “character,” or to perpetuate a religious faith, or any other purpose however good, is to make education a means to something quite irrelevant. Such misuse shows that people are not interested in their education but in something else. Education, the development of people, is not a means, it is itself the true end of civilization.

While education is not _for_ anything, indirectly it improves everything that people do. Make education the aim and meaning of living, and all becomes different. Experience has a new center of gravity. Facts fall into new and more significant perspective. Objects, distinctions, relationships, qualities, are seen which before passed unnoticed. And as personality does not exist in a vacuum but in the relationships established between organism and environment, no improvement of it can fail to make itself felt in the quality of one’s work. Animal training may give one the means to make a living; liberal education gives living a meaning.