In spite of all this popular interest, or perhaps because of it, the cause of education is in a bad way. It is dangerous to encourage people to think they are educated when they are not, or to believe they are acquiring it when they are in fact getting something else. Much that passes for adult education serves only to make people more superficial and opinionated than they were before. It is very doubtful if the general level of our intellectual life has been raised by such knowledge as the public has gained. The public can read and we have with us the Hearst papers and the tabloids. Literacy has placed the bulk of the population daily at the mercy of the propagandist and the press agent. With libraries and colleges and high schools everywhere, and after a century of science, vast sections of the population can be swept by such movements as the Ku Klux Klan and Fundamentalism. State after state prohibits the teaching in its schools of such scientific knowledge as will lead to a belief in evolution. Crazy reform, fantastic religious innovation, political foolishness and unbalanced partisanship may at any time sweep over the country. Intelligence in this country makes a poor showing in competition with quackery and complacent ignorance for popular leadership. It is common to lay the blame for the present state of affairs at the door of the schools and colleges. Without doubt they must accept some measure of responsibility in the matter. In many instances the only alternative to a general slump in standards of scholarship has been a narrow academic pedantry. There has been much yielding to the pressure of popular prejudice, much display of conventional morality as a cover for second-rate educational activity. Faculties are well aware how little a student may know and get through college. The colleges themselves seem to have participated in the general cheapening of education by their generosity in granting honorary degrees. Almost any one who is successful in business or prominent in politics becomes a “Doctor.” Erasmus in the fifteenth century, even though he had already become probably the leading classical scholar of his times, studied and taught at Paris for nine years before he was granted his doctor’s degree. When the late Mr. Bryan threatened to print all his college degrees on his card, in answer to the repeated statement that he was an ignoramus, the joke was really on the colleges.