It is characteristic of our compliance in matters educational that of late years we have seen subject after subject added to the curricula of our public schools, and have cheerfully voted money for them, without having much conception of their value or of the results attained by introducing them. Education is our shibboleth, our formula. The school diploma and the college degree constitute our new baptism of conformity. We do not question their authority or their efficacy. They absolve us. Our public schools have become experimental stations for the testing of theories, until the demand for more and more specialization has resulted in an overcrowding of the curricula and a consequent superficiality in the teaching. “That any man should die ignorant who is capable of knowledge, that I call a tragedy,” says Carlyle. But there is a greater tragedy still, which is that our capability for knowledge may be so overburdened by irrelevant information that it becomes worthless to us. We study everything and we know nothing. Our schools become detached from the realities of life because we pursue so diligently the semblance of those realities. Our objective is definitely practical. We expect education to fit boys and girls to cope successfully with the everyday affairs of life, we frown on anything that savors of the unpractical, and we instinctively distrust the word “beauty.” We are like Mime who thought that courage lay in the sword itself. We, too, have the pieces of the broken blade, and they are as useless to us as they were to him. Of what avail all this information which we so slowly and painfully acquire? Can it be put together Mime-fashion? Or is there something that can fuse it? Has it not all a common source, and is not that source in nature? “Every object has its roots in central nature and may be exhibited to us so as to represent the world.” This unity in things, to which Emerson refers, gives order and sequence to all objects, persons, and ideas; they become significant and potent, for we see them as they really are. No one can be said to be educated who fails to apprehend that unification of all matter, of all thought, of all sensation--that harmony in things which brings into relation a speck of dust and a star, the individual and the cosmos. The very thing we fear most in education is the one thing that tempers all the others--namely, beauty. For in education, as in everything else, beauty means sequence, order, and harmony; beauty relates things to each other, multiplies arithmetic by geography, objects by sounds, acts by feelings. If there were a world with one human being in it, and only one, his sweetest, gentlest, and most inevitably perfect act would be to leap-into the mother sea and rejoin nature. An isolated fact or an unrelated piece of information only differs in this respect from the human being in that it never was alive.