The day is coming when low grade men will not be desired for any kind of work on earth. If there is real truth in the old saying that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, we shall gradually learn that we must set men at all our work who are capable of doing it well. It is a great question whether cheap labor is really cheap after all. The chances are that the most capable labor obtainable in any line is the highest economy. In a recent short story, one colored man is made to remark to another that work is not to be expected from a gentleman of brains like himself. “Brains,” he went on to say, “is to keep you from wukkin’.” This has too long been the general notion about intellectual ability. Training, both real and fancied, has too often been made the excuse for parasitism. The purpose of education is not to qualify one for getting through life on a minimum of toil. It is rather calculated to enable one to perform a maximum of work with a minimum of friction and waste. In other words, education at its best is not a means to idleness but to efficiency. The most representative products of our best schools are sufficient proofs of the productive element in the highest educational ideal. They are not idlers, but workers. Their work does not consist of mere fuss and parade. It brings forth the fruit of achievement. The idler is either a product of no school at all, a product of a school with a mistaken educational ideal, or a mutation from the really cultured type. In this regard, our notion of education is essentially different from the European one. In the Old World, the prevailing idea of an educational institution was that its work was the preparation of young people to be polished aristocrats. The desired product was the graceful and courtly gentleman or lady. That conception may have been somewhat changed by the war, but such was what it was before the world was so largely made over in that great crucible of death. Our idea of the aim of education is much the same here, except that our schools and teachers try to foster a somewhat different idea of what it takes to make an aristocrat. They do not proceed upon the theory that an idler is an aristocrat. The accepted canon in educational circles is that a man is not trained at all unless trained to be good for something, and that he must prove his culture by bringing forth fruits meet for it. In their efforts to establish the productive ideal in the thinking of the public as well as in the work of the school itself, our educational system has many handicaps to overcome. One of them is the fact that idleness has been so long and so well glorified in fiction and on the moving picture screen. Too many characters that walk before the eyes of our people, especially the boys and girls, are rich without working for their wealth. They live in palatial houses. They wear the finest of clothing. They indulge in the most expensive pleasures. Yet they toil not, neither do they spin.