The education of a people at any time is its answer to the riddle of life. This answer is more than giving an account of the processes of nature; it is the opening and closing of doors upon the possibilities of experience--and upon various human types. Thus education is selective. It is the sifting out of the relative worth of men. It finds the significance of living to be the struggle for excellence. Its goal is a higher type of living man and woman. Its great task therefore, in the modern world, is the reassertion of the _inequalities_ which mass appeal ignores, the rediscovery for the modern spirit of the distinction between superiority and inferiority. It is impossible to lift any mind from a lower to a higher plane when that which distinguishes one plane from another is obliterated by placing all on a level. Appreciation of distinctions of worth is an essential of a liberal education, as it is of the whole spiritual life of man. CHAPTER IX EDUCATION AND WORK In the closing sentence of the preceding chapter, I used the words “spiritual life.” Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that I did not have in mind anything vaguely metaphysical, supernatural or mystical. I meant the phrase to designate a hierarchy of values which is possible to an organism capable of exercising choice among its experiences. It is in the sense that it deals with qualities and their relative importance that education may be said to be spiritual, spiritual in a purely naturalistic sense. It is the ordering of interests and habit patterns so that behavior is characterized by a tone and a significance that it would not otherwise possess. There are those who write and speak of education as if the mind and its ideas existed in a world apart from the world of things. It is possible for a man to pursue his studies in complete isolation from the world about him. But as mental life is possible only in response to some environment, such pursuit of learning merely substitutes an artificial and sequestered environment for the actual one. If the meanings and values disclosed in this artificial environment remain permanently different from those which might be realized in the world of our daily tasks and relationships, such education is merely an elaborate escape from reality. The educated mind responds to our common world. It differs from the uneducated mind not in that it responds to a different set of situations, but in that it responds with a different system of values. Education is not so much a special interest separated from other interests as it is a method of transforming all our interests.