The notion that experience is necessarily the best teacher is popular. The newspapers encourage it. If a man makes a success in business, interviewers seek his opinion on every conceivable subject. In worker’s classes there is occasionally a student who has no doubt that his experience in the shop is a better education than that which people get from books. Such students do not as a rule gain much from study, for no matter what subject is under discussion, they always know more about it than the instructor. Experience as such teaches just what is experienced and nothing more. Few minds are able to reflect judiciously upon experience or to draw correct conclusions from it. Labor is something that can be known only by one who has experienced it, and this experience is important for anyone who desires a broad knowledge of human life. But it is with work as it is with travel: each is an aid to education only as it quickens insight. The man on the Bowery who boasts that he has traveled over America from coast to coast may really never have left the Bowery; in each place he has visited, he finds himself in the same sort of lodging house, in the same environment, among the same sort of companions, all with the same interests. So with many kinds of work. Much of it is mere routine. He who from day to day does the same thing, until he is able to perform the movements with a minimum of effort and attention, is certainly acquiring a habit, but we have seen that not all habit formation is education. Those who work with certain kinds of machinery frequently complain of the monotony of their work. I think that one of the serious objections to such work is that it has so little educational value. Perhaps this objection may be offset by the fact that machine production makes possible a shortening of the working day and hence gives the worker more leisure time. Some think that adult education is important because it gives people something to do in their unemployed hours. But people do not always improve their minds during the time when they are free from labor, and many whose work is routine, possess by nature or develop routine habits of mind which interfere with their education. They become victims of fixed ideas, of slogans and catchwords.