Thus the religious propagandist will continue repeating an obsolete dogma long after its untruth is a matter of common knowledge. The use which propagandists make of rumor is another example of this principle. During the war we saw much of this sort of thing. The wildest fabrications were accepted uncritically; when everyone was repeating them it seemed disloyal to question their bases of fact. In any political campaign the editorials and speeches are made up largely of repetitions. Popular moral ideas are psychologically similar; we call them platitudes. In fact public discussion which is mostly propaganda of one sort or another consists almost wholly of monotonous repetition. Anyone who has had experience with an open forum will, I think, agree with me that the discussion from the floor--and not unfrequently the platform also--shows an amazing monotony of repetition. I have known men for years to gain the recognition of the chair and repeat the same phrases night after night, no matter what was the subject under discussion. We love routine. There is I believe less routine learning, less mere memory drill, in our schools now than in former years. I doubt if many students learn geography or history or the multiplication tables or Latin grammar in the manner I was made to learn these subjects. However, it is not in these subjects, which are at best the mere scaffolding of knowledge, that humdrum does the greatest harm. It is in its failure to stimulate genuine thinking about the important human interests that education commonly falls short of its liberalizing function. There is a dullness about sing-song repetition of the multiplication table or the recital of the names of the rivers of China, but it does not equal in monotony the uniformity with which college graduates will say the same things about politics, the protective tariff, the labor problem, the constitution of the United States, or the relation of commerce to culture. I recently heard a professor, who holds an important chair in one of our leading universities say that his institution strove not so much for scholarship as to develop a certain type of college man. No doubt he had in mind a desirable type of man, but any attempt to mould a group to a single form can succeed only at the expense of the individuality of the student. Moreover, such a goal naturally causes the authorities to adopt methods of drill and standardization. Whenever the aim of education is fixed in advance, it tends to propaganda and illiberalism.