“On Mars it has for a long time been our idea that the function of the school is to put our youth in touch with what all sorts of Martians have thought and are thinking, have felt and are feeling. I say ‘put in touch’ rather than ‘teach,’ because it is not so much our notion to pack their minds and hearts as to proffer samples of our various cultures and supply keys to the storehouses--not unlike your libraries, museums, and laboratories--that contain our records. We prefer to think of schooling as a kind of thoroughfare between our past and our present, an avenue to the recovery and appreciation of as many as possible of those innumerable differences between Martian and Martian, those conflicting speculations and cogitations, myths and hypotheses regarding our planet and ourselves that have gone into the warp and woof of our mental history. Thus we have hoped not only to preserve and add to the body of Martian knowledge, but also to understand better and utilize more variously our present minds. So it seems to us perfectly natural, and has rather pleased than distressed us, that our students should emerge from their studies with a multitude of differing sympathies, beliefs, tastes, and ambitions. We have thought that such an education enriched the lives of all of us, lives that ignorance could not fail to constrict and subject to hum-drum monotony. “So when I return to Mars and report that I found Earth’s most favourable continent inhabited by its most literate great people, a people that has carried the use of print and other means of communication to a point we Martians have never dared dream about; that this people has at once the most widely diffused enthusiasm for education and the most comprehensive school equipment on Earth; and finally that this people is at the same time the most uniform in its life--well, I fear I shall not be believed.” On subsequent visits the Martian might, as a wise man does who is confronted by a logical impasse, re-examine the terms of his paradox.