Nevertheless, the essential Adam does break through and quiz the scene. Though it come lowest in his scale of emphasis, the typical underclassman knows the qualms and hungers of curiosity, experiments a little with forbidden fruit, at some time fraternizes with a man of richer if disreputable experience, perhaps strikes up a wistful friendship with a sympathetic instructor. Then the world of normal duties and rewards and certainties closes round him, and security in it becomes his first concern. Sometime he intends really to read, to think long thoughts again, to go to the bottom of things. Meanwhile he falls into the easy habit of applying such words as “radical” or “highbrow” to those infrequent hardier spirits who continue restless and unappeased. Later in life you will catch him explaining that radicalism is a perfectly natural manifestation of adolescence and the soundest foundation for mature conservatism. Wise churchmen still talk that way about religious doubt, and bide their time, and later refer to the “death of doubt”--which has really been buried alive. The Martian would conclude that the function of terrestrial education is to bury curiosity alive. But could he now feel that this educational establishment, this going machine of assimilation, is responsible for our uniformity? Will not American school and college life now seem too perfect a reflection of American adult life to be its parent? Everything in that scale of college values, from the vicarious excitements of football to what Santayana has called the “deprivations of disbelief” has its exact analogue in our life at large; and neither any college tradition nor yet the “genteel tradition” is of so much significance as the will to tradition that both reveal. The Martian will long since have suspected himself guilty of a very human error, that of getting the cart before the horse. For we have made our schools in our own image. They are not our prisons, but our homes. Every now and again we discipline a rash instructor who carries too far his private taste for developing originality; we pass acts that require teachers to sink their own differences in our unanimity; and our fatuous faith in the public school system as the “cradle of liberty” rests on the political control we exercise over it. Far from being the dupes of education, we ourselves dupe the educated; and that college men do not rebel is due to the fact that inside a world our uniformity dominates as easily as it dominates the school, the regimen works, college men really do get ahead, and the “queer” really are frustrate.