The prime relaxation is talk, infinite talk--within its local range, full of tang, flicking with deft satire the rumps of pompous asses, burlesquing the comic (that is, the abnormal) in campus situations, making of gossip a staccato criticism--and beyond that range, a rather desultory patter about professional sport, shows, shallow books, the froth of fashion, all treated lightly but taken with what a gravity! For the other relaxations there are, according to taste, the theatre of girls and music, the novel, bath-robed sessions at poker and bridge, late afternoon tennis or golf or handball (very nearly the only sports left to play for their own sake), and the bouts with Bacchus and Venus which, though they attract fewer college men than non-college men, are everywhere the moral holidays that insure our over-driven Puritanism against collapse. A favourite subject for college debates and Freshman themes argues the case for and against going to college. You could listen to scores of such debates, read thousands of such themes, without once meeting a clear brief for education as a satisfaction of human curiosity. Everywhere below the level of disinterested scholarship, education is regarded as access to that body of common and practical information without which one’s hands and tongue will be tied in the company of one’s natural peers. “Institutions of learning,” as the National Security League lately advised the Vice-President of the United States, “are established primarily for the dissemination of knowledge, which is acquaintance with fact and not with theory.” Consequently the universal expectation of the educational establishment has little to do with any wakening of appropriate if differing personalities, and has everything to do with a standard patina, varying only in its lustre, its brighter or duller reflection of the established scene.