Nearly everyone in America can read, for the "schoolhouse is the bulwark of democratic freedom." However, with the decrease in illiteracy there has gone a corresponding lowering of literary and intellectual standards, a growing timidity in telling the truth, and a passion for the sensationally commonplace. If it be true that before people may be politically free they must be free to function mentally, one wonders how much of an aid to liberty the public schools in this country have been, or if, with their colossal impersonal systems and stereotyped methods of instruction, they have not rather on the whole succeeded chiefly in making learning uninteresting, dulling curiosity and killing habits of independent thinking. There is probably no public institution where the spirit of the crowd reigns to the extent that it does in the public school. The aim seems to be to mold the child to type, make him the good, plodding citizen, teaching him only so much as some one thinks it is to the public's interest that he should know. I am sure that everyone who is familiar with the actions of the school authorities in New York City during the two years, 1918 and 1919, will be impelled to look elsewhere for much of that liberty which is supposed to go with democracy. Some years ago I conducted a little investigation into the mental habits of the average high-school graduate. An examination was made of twenty or more young people who had been out of school one year. This is doubtless too limited a number to give the findings great general significance, but I give the results in brief for what they are worth. These students had been in school for eleven years. I thought that they ought at least to have a minimum of general cultural information and to be able to express some sort of opinion about the commonplaces of our spiritual heritage. The questions asked were such as follow: What is the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States? What is a dicotyledon? Does the name Darwin mean anything to you? Have you ever heard of William James? What is the significance of the battle of Tours? Who was Thomas Jefferson? There were twenty questions in all. The average grade, even with the most liberal marking, was 44.6. The general average was raised by one pupil who made a grade of 69. But then we should not be too severe upon the public-school graduate. One of the brightest college graduates I know left a large Eastern institution believing that Karl Marx was a philologist. Another, a graduate from a Western college, thought that Venus de Milo was an Italian count who had been born without any arms. I know a prominent physician, whose scientific training is such that he has been a lecturer in a medical college, who believes that Heaven is located just a few miles up in the sky, beyond the Milky Way. These are doubtless exceptional cases, but how many persons with university