One educator of adults conducts short-time “institutes” for farmers in which during a period of two or three weeks instruction is given in such subjects as the fertilization of the soil, rotation of crops, marketing, and the elements of bookkeeping. Others offer instruction to industrial workers which will improve their efficiency and deepen their loyalty to the company. Others teach various trades and professions. Much of the Americanization propaganda which gave employment to uplifters during the years following the war is now called adult education. There is a group of very serious idealists who believe that by means of adult education they may initiate working people into the “proletarian culture of the future,” and arm the working class with the necessary weapons for a social revolution. Others would conduct schools in which young people may be trained to become professional labor leaders. To still others the task of adult education is very clear and simple: it is nothing else than the transformation of our entire civilization by the method of leading people back to nature and enabling them to express their emotions, to which end classes in appreciation and self-expression are organized, and students are sent out after two or three months of such training prepared to teach the emotional awakening to others. Adult education thus becomes a matter of slogans. Each educator is sure he has it and can give the formula. It is that “every man be given opportunity to think for himself,” or it is to give people “a new and modern world view,” or to help people “get out of the ruts in which they find themselves,” or to enable one to “evaluate his experience,” or it is “an adventure in independence.” Many of these things may be very desirable, but are they education? Taken together, they reveal something of the confusion which always results when men try to find their standards of value in the passing interests of the hour. Adult education is a democratic movement and hence tends to make the desires and ideals of the uneducated rather than those of the educated its standards and aims. The idea sometimes prevails in education, just as it has prevailed in religion and in politics, that if only the masses may emancipate themselves from the past and start all over again, setting up their own values, there will necessarily be great improvement. Hence Labor, for instance, is to have “its own education,” whatever that is. To be sure, every person, be he a laborer or anyone else, must in the end educate himself, and perhaps the masses in insisting upon their own values and ideals can make no worse business of their education than when they are “given” the education which someone equally uneducated and materialistic thinks is good for them.