We do not know at present whether the alleged general interest in adult education is evidence of a spontaneous and growing desire for knowledge, or is something promoted, worked up by interests which would “educate the masses” in order to attain certain economic ends, individual or social. Nearly three million persons are said to be annually enrolled for various courses of study outside the resident classes of established institutions of learning. Undoubtedly a great variety of motives prompts these hundreds of thousands of people to take up the task of study. But wide-spread as this interest is, popularization of knowledge is not the same as the humanization of knowledge. We have seen how the values of religion may decline into empty caricatures of the spiritual life amongst certain popular sects. Those engaged in the work of adult education, often fear that the movement may become standardized after the fashion of the public school system. Is it possible to keep up the standards without resorting to the mechanical uniformity we commonly call standardization? I think this is possible only if we are guided by a philosophy of liberal education. Lose sight of such a philosophy and adult education becomes a confusion of tongues. In such confusion there is of course freedom from uniformity, yet there may be much standardization; each educational cult may easily degenerate into a doctrinaire, misguided sect. If I am correct in holding that the aim of liberal education is to produce the cultivated amateur, who possesses in general the mental traits which in the preceding chapters of this book we have seen to characterize the liberally educated mind, we have in the pursuit of such a goal the very thing that will save adult education from degenerating, like Protestantism, into a conflict of narrow orthodoxies. Without such a goal, any passing fancy or popular prejudice, however ungrounded in philosophy, may come to serve as a dominant ideal of education. Adult education then becomes the means to every sort of propaganda and personal ambition.