And of course everyone wishes to tell his fellows what to think. The general interest in our neighbor’s “education” rather than our own is responsible for much of the present confusion of education with propaganda. This is especially true in the education of children. Scarcely one person in ten believes children should be told the truth. Children are credulous and easily acquire habits which become fixed for life: hence the tendency to take advantage of their innocence and while giving them the instruction which it is now recognized that society owes them, to add something which certain people wish them to believe when they grow up. Consequently there has hardly ever been a time when education was not to some extent diverted into propagandist channels. Governments and churches and ruling classes and commercial groups have always sought to get their hands on the institutions for the education of youth and utilize them for their own interests. The tendency is universal. Radicals denounce the Fundamentalists, the capitalists and the Catholic Church for doing this sort of thing, and then do the same thing themselves; as for example, in the revolutionary propaganda that sometimes passes as “worker’s education,” the socialist Sunday School, the system of public education in Soviet Russia. The habit of speaking of propaganda as if it were education has grown with the activities of the advertising profession and other expert manufacturers of public opinion. Anyone with anything to sell “educates” the public to buy his product. The word is so commonly used for advertising that few question the legitimacy of such use. In fact the popularity of this use of the word education has a definite psychological cause. Many people would like to get their education by the easy method of reading subway advertisements. It is pleasant moreover to feel that we are being educated when we glance at the billboards on the way from New York to Philadelphia or look over the back pages in the Saturday Evening Post. I once heard an editor of a farm journal boast that his paper had educated the housewives of his state to buy cereal in packages rather than in bulk. A recent well-written book on the psychology of advertising by a gentleman who styles himself a “Public Relations Counsel” explains the technique of making propaganda. The author refers to such propagandist efforts as education, and says that the difference between education and propaganda is this: when your side of the case is given publicity, that is education; when your opponent publishes his side, that is propaganda.