When the “privileged classes” are mentioned it is usually in an invidious sense, but there is a very real and inescapable way in which a boy brought up in a family which is cultured and which at least has money for travel is privileged as compared with the boy brought up in a home and a general environment that is not cultured and who has never seen anything beyond fifty miles from his village or small town until he goes to college. In the first case, a very large part of the boy’s education has been carried on outside of college altogether. Social intercourse and foreign travel have given him certain elements of education utterly beyond the reach of the other. There is all the difference in the world, for example, between reading about the cathedral of Chartres and standing in it. In our emotional and æsthetic lives it is even more true than in other respects that we learn by experience. How are we really to educate the vast mob of boys and girls now crowding into our colleges, whose experience has been limited to the architecture of our Main Streets,[Pg 160] learning the names of Beethoven and the other composers (or getting garbled versions of their works on radio or Victrola), and whose experience of great painting and sculpture is at most limited to black and white pictures in some book on art? For the “privileged classes” college education in a way is supplementary education, but for a large part of those now crowding into the fifteen hundred colleges of America it is the whole of their education, and if it is limited to books, and, even worse, largely limited to what may be learned from books for the purely practical art of making a living, is it any wonder that the ideal and conception of “education” and “culture” are steadily narrowing? It must be remembered also that the college graduates of today will consider themselves the “educated” class of the future, and with the public largely in control of education, what will they consider education to be if they have been told they themselves were educated enough to get their degrees by studying chicken-raising with a little history and other things thrown in for the looks of it?