Certain qualifications must however be made. While much of the demand for education is genuine and spontaneous, much of it is spurious, irrelevant, inconsequential. The increased attendance at school or university does not necessarily mean that more education is going on. It is frequently said that our colleges are crowded with inferior students. Athletics, fraternities, schools of business and the automobile tend to displace science and the classics. American youth has acquired its ideal of college life from the motion pictures. We should not infer from the large numbers engaged in adult education that democracy has suddenly decided to rid itself of intellectual shoddiness. If the advertisements of correspondence courses in self-improvement which regularly appear in the popular magazines are an indication of the instruction offered for sale, people might better spend their money for patent medicine or in having their fortunes told. At best adult education consists largely of brief courses of a vocational nature. Even worker’s education, a movement which has inspired hope in many liberals, may easily be over estimated. Much of it is little more than a recrudescence of antiquated radical propaganda, designed to enable the proletariat to “emancipate itself from the slavery of capitalism,” and to get it “ready for a millennial industrial democracy.” The initiative often comes not from studious minded workers, but from enthusiastic intellectuals and idealistic uplifters. The cultural gesture is often pathetic or comic. It is not uncommon for those who have completed the courses of study in a “workers” college to find themselves more unadjusted than they were before. It is sought to make of adult education something which will broaden the interests and sympathies of people regardless of their daily occupation--or along with it--to lift men’s thought out of the monotony and drudgery which are the common lot, to free the mind from servitude and herd opinion, to train habits of judgment and of appreciation of value, to carry on the struggle for human excellence in our day and generation, to temper passion with wisdom, to dispel prejudice by better knowledge of self, to enlist all men, in the measure that they have capacity for it, in the achievement of civilization.