While education is not _for_ anything, indirectly it improves everything that people do. Make education the aim and meaning of living, and all becomes different. Experience has a new center of gravity. Facts fall into new and more significant perspective. Objects, distinctions, relationships, qualities, are seen which before passed unnoticed. And as personality does not exist in a vacuum but in the relationships established between organism and environment, no improvement of it can fail to make itself felt in the quality of one’s work. Animal training may give one the means to make a living; liberal education gives living a meaning. CHAPTER III LIBERAL EDUCATION VS. PROPAGANDA Whoever is concerned about his education should be on his guard against propaganda. He who assists in the education of another should be doubly cautious. The temptation to convert people to our own particular cause, movement or belief is almost irresistible. An epidemic itch for manipulating the public has infected the whole population. Perhaps never was the business of “selling” ideas and interests of all sorts so common a practice or so cleverly done. Press agents, publicity experts, advertisers and propagandists have become a pest. Much of the news is “treated” for interests which may or may not be disclosed. Militarists, pacifists, prohibitionists, birth controlists, social workers, business interests, anti-vivisectionists, radicals, reactionaries and all kinds of reformers insinuate themselves everywhere like crawling insects. Every legislative body is over-run with lobbyists. Every government, our own included, fights with propaganda as deadly as poison gas. Churches have reduced even the spreading of the gospel to the level of advertising. And to judge by the popularity of one of the vulgarest books ever written about the founder of Christianity, a large number of churchmen are happy to believe that Jesus Christ was the world’s greatest salesman and business executive! It ought not to be necessary to say that propaganda is not education. But the confusion of the two is common. It is often very difficult to enlist the interest of people even in their own education if the propagandist motive is left out of it. I find that our students are often at first perplexed. They ask me, “What party or creed or social movement do you represent? What are you trying to convert us to?” I have even been asked why I lecture at all, if it is not my purpose to tell students what they should think and do. The idea of a course of study as an adventure in truth-seeking, an investigation deliberately planned without made-in-advance conclusions or ulterior aims, is difficult for many minds. If no partisan motive is apparent, students often suspect that there must be some dark and secret conspiracy. People like to have their instructors labeled and tagged. Otherwise they feel that they are not being given anything. They prefer to be told what to think.