When the ancients said that knowledge is knowledge of the good, they meant in part that with the increase of knowledge comes better discrimination. If education is _for_ anything it is that we learn to choose the good. By the “good” I do not mean good in general, or good as an abstraction of philosophical discourse, nor the conventionally good. I mean any excellence whatsoever. In order to see and appreciate excellence, you must yourself have struggled for it. He who has never striven to surpass himself, surrounds himself with the shoddy, the second-rate, the cheap. In matters of taste, of sentiment, of good workmanship, he cannot distinguish between that which is genuine and that which is imitation. In matters of taste there is much that is purely arbitrary and conventional, so that what is good taste in one age may be bad taste in another. Nevertheless, there is a psychological soundness in our use of the word taste to designate certain judgments of worth. It implies some degree of self-restraint, a sensitiveness to subtle stimuli which comes with the habit of giving attention to minute differences of quality. In contrast, animals which gulp down their food hastily and in great quantities do not pause to taste it. Similarly, the mind which has not disciplined itself “swallows things whole,” as we say. It is not disturbed by the incongruous or the hideous. It is sensitive only to coarser stimuli: it prefers the hackneyed, the raucous, the loud and flashy. I once knew a church in a small town which worshipped in a plain rectangular old building with colonial windows. When a rival denomination erected a monstrous building with a huge circular stained-glass window facing the street, the group which worshipped in the old structure became dissatisfied. After much difficulty in securing the money, a committee was sent to a near-by city and purchased a quantity of gaudily-colored translucent paper similar to that one used occasionally to see on the front door of a saloon. This paper the congregation proudly pasted on its colonial window panes. The architecture of the average church in this country and the hymns the people sing are much better indications of the level of their spiritual life than are the creeds they profess. The general cultural level of the population is revealed by the style of houses men build, the kind of furniture with which they surround themselves, the type of motion picture which becomes popular, the magazines on the news stands, the character of the journals which have the largest circulation, the “song hits” of the day, the programs which are broadcast for the radio. These things all have spiritual significance, they indicate a prevailing type of reaction toward all the values of experience.