EDUCATION AS THE TRANSMITTER OF THE PAST. Education is the process by which society undertakes the transmission of its social heritage. Indeed the main function of education in static societies is the initiation of the young into already established customs and traditions. It is the method used to hand down those social habits which the influential and articulate classes in a society regard as important enough to have early fixed in its young members. The past is simply transmitted, handed down _en masse_. It is a set of patterns to be imitated, of ideals to be continued, of mechanisms for attaining the fixed purposes which are current in the group. In progressive societies education may be used not simply to hand down habits of doing, feeling, and thinking, from the older generation to the younger, but to make habitual in the young reflective consideration of the ends which must be attained, and reflective inquiry into the means for attaining them. The past will not be handed down in indiscriminate completeness. The present and its problems are regarded as the standard of importance, and the past is considered as an incomparable reservoir of materials and methods which may contribute to the ends sought in the present. But there is so much material and so little time, that selection must be made. Many things in the past, interesting on their own merits, must be omitted in favor of those habits, traditions, and recorded files of knowledge which are most fruitful and enlightening in the attainment of contemporary purposes. What those purposes are depends, of course, on ideals of the group in control of the process of education. But these purposes of ideals may be derived from present situations and not taken merely because they have long been current in the group. Thus, in a predominantly industrial civilization, it may be found more advisable and important to transmit the scientific and technical methods of control which men have acquired in recent generations than the traditional liberal arts. Science may be found more important than the humanities, medicine than moral theory. Even such education that tends to call itself "liberal" or "cultural" is effective and genuine education just in so far as it does illuminate the world in which we live. The religion and art, the literature and life of the past broaden the meaning and the background of our lives. They are valuable just because they do enrich the lives of those who are exposed to their influence. If studying the great literature and the art of the past did not clarify the mind and emancipate the spirit, enabling men to live more richly in the present, they would hardly be as studiously cherished and transmitted as they are. We are, after all, living in the present. The culture of the past either does or does not illuminate it. If it does not it is a competing environment, a shadow world in which we may play truant from actuality, but which