Now, I believe, the wise man will pursue his education always viewing it with a certain light-heartedness and detachment. Wisdom itself will not be taken too seriously by one who sees that in the best of it there is an entertaining amount of human folly. Like Falstaff’s confession, “I am not much better than one of the wicked,” Socrates, the wisest, knows he is not much better than one of the foolish. People who solemnly try to improve their minds, with groanings of the spirit that cannot be uttered, determined to reach some cultural “Pike’s peak or bust,” do not often become educated; they become intellectual bores. Education is a way of living, but it is never a substitute for life. Rational living does not mean that interest, feeling, love, respect, practical achievement, do not count, or that in the end education should make of life a mere _knowledge affair_. One does not pursue scholarship merely for the sake of philosophical contemplation, or as an intellectual trick. And there is no magic about education, but plain common sense. I think we may safely say that a life guided by reason and good taste is better than one enslaved to tradition, tabu, narrow utilitarianism, conventionalism and passion. But surely education is not a hair shirt to be worn in order to discipline the spirit and achieve the modern idea of salvation. Neither is it something to be attained by practicing before the mirror. It is nothing ostentatious. Nor is it to be made a cult of. It does not work miracles, nor can it create out of airy nothingness an intelligence that does not exist. I think much of the criticism of education that one frequently hears these days grows out of an exaggerated notion of the transformation which some people expect a few years of education to work. I know a number of college graduates who are very bitter in their criticism of college education, protesting that they did not learn anything that did them any good. Perhaps they expected too much for the amount of effort put forth and tried to do too great a business on a small intellectual capital. Or perhaps such criticism is in part a pose; in certain circles it is now “the thing.”