But too much is demanded of institutions of learning. Large numbers of students come to them with no background of cultural tradition, and they return to an environment which is distinctly hostile to intellectual pursuits. The public clamor that some one educate us in spite of ourselves is only another way of shouting, “We have piped unto you and ye have not danced.” The ultimate responsibility for the condition of education rests upon the average members of society, and it is reducible to a moral factor. Carlyle once said that people could only be taken in by quacks when they had a certain element of quackery in their own souls. When multitudes regard education merely as a shortcut to financial success, or as a device for appearing to be something they are not, or as an instrument for converting others to their own partisan beliefs, they will of course get the “education” they desire. Once I thought that ignorance was an innocent thing, a sort of spiritual vacuum passively waiting to be filled with precious truths. Except in children ignorance is by no means an innocent thing. It is a very active element in human life. We must overcome strong resistances before we may begin to learn some things. We keep ourselves in ignorance because there are facts and truths whose existence we prefer not to admit. The man who strives to educate himself--and no one else can educate him--must win a certain victory over his own nature. He must learn to smile at his dear idols, analyze his every prejudice, scrap if necessary his fondest and most consoling belief, question his presuppositions, and take his chances with the truth. The greater the need of education, the stronger the resistance to it. Whether the present increase of interest in education is to be an empty gesture depends upon whether the thing demanded is really education. There is no one right way, and certainly each age with its special needs and peculiar industrial and cultural environment should make its own contribution to educational achievement. But there is something which belongs to no special time and to all times, a way of approaching our tasks or valuing experiences. No one who is merely a creature of his own times is really educated. There is conceivable a world in which,--great as are the historical accidents that separate them--a Socrates, or a Plato, or a Cicero, or an Erasmus, a Voltaire, a Goethe, a Huxley would be at home. Much as they differ, there is yet something, which the educated have in common, a quality of spirit, something that may not be defined, but that right-minded people recognize. We shall strive from various avenues of approach to envisage it, for to miss it is to miss all. It is the meaning of a liberal education. CHAPTER II LIBERAL EDUCATION VS. ANIMAL TRAINING