Dr. Kallen would probably not go so far as to say that the sole aim of Labor Education is to equip the members of the working class with such knowledge as will enable them to master the industrial environment and change the social system. But there are those who hold such a view, just as there are those who hold that the worker should receive only such education as will make him a more competent workman. Both views, one held by extreme radicals, the other by conservative capitalists, have in common the belief that education for workers is purely practical training. “Cultural” subjects are sometimes studied, and there is a lively demand for them, but the tendency is to regard this interest as an “escape” from reality into a world of fanciful contemplation and mere verbal exercise. It is an intellectual luxury, a form of entertainment or inspiration to which a worker is entitled, but it is an interest which is a little under suspicion of being “bourgeois.” Hence in all phases of education, this issue is debated. The issue is inevitable in a time like the present, with a classical tradition surviving in an industrial civilization. Have we any need in the modern world of cultural traditions which have their origin in antiquity? Should we or could we dispense with all educational values except those which are coterminous with the present industrial situation? Wherever such an issue arises, I have learned to suspect both sides. As a rule both are based upon a common presupposition which is an error. Here the presupposition is that the important factor in education is the question what is to be taught, rather than the spirit of learning itself. Education is conceived of as knowledge acquired. Attention is fixed not on the learning process through which an individual becomes reoriented to his world, but upon the end result, something fixed and done, a certain amount of information stored up. Is this what we mean by learning? Is it receiving and memorizing a given something either cultural or practical? Or is it an adventure in any kind of truth-seeking which changes the quality of one’s future experience and enables one to behave not merely efficiently but wisely, with a broad view and a sympathetic understanding of the many ways in which men have striven to create meaning and value out of the possibilities of human life? If this last is correct, the real question is not what shall be learned but how and why and to what end. Is learning a venture in spiritual freedom that is humanism, or is it a routine process of animal training? Both cultural and practical knowledge may be reduced to animal training--and they generally are. It is there that the issue between them arises.