But never, perhaps, has the divergence between life as it had to be lived and the civilities taught us in school been greater. Never has the ideal world, which, after all, it is the chief business of education to mirror, been more different from the facts of experience than in America. The ridiculous scientist of Cooper’s “Prairie” who mistakes his donkey for a new monster and thinks it more important to call the buffalo the bison than to eat when hungry of its hump, is a symbol of the contrast between what we learned and what we did in America. In the eighteenth century, education for most Americans was practical preparation for a knowledge of God’s ways with man. In the nineteenth it had become not a preparation for life so much as an antiseptic against the demoralizations of a purely material struggle to open up a continent. The results have been of grave political importance. For the divergence between theory and practice explains the curiously traditional character of our schooling as we knew it in youth, as our grandfathers knew it in youth. I am not now speaking of the wearisome controversies over Latin and Greek and classic English literature, the so-called traditional subjects which make up a large part of education. It is not the letter, but the spirit, that makes the thing taught traditional. And ever since democracy began, the teacher has had to be the priest and guardian of tradition in America. He has been an anxious parent stretching the coverlet of racial culture over the restless limbs of little immigrants. He has taught reading, writing, and arithmetic as a means of holding fast to our tradition. He has taught literature and history and “moral ethics” and “natural science” as the containers of that tradition. We have almost forgotten that for a time in the early nineteenth century it seemed quite possible that the frontier would become Indian rather than European in its culture. We see clearly now how possible it would have been for whole regions of the South to relapse into negro semi-barbarism. We may guess that save for the teacher and his grinding in of tradition the white races of North America might have slipped backward, as too clearly have the white races in many parts of Latin America.