With the modern theories of learning there has come some difference of opinion regarding the educational value of books. Traditional education consisted almost wholly of book knowledge. Knowledge of the books written about a subject was rated as familiarity with the subject itself. There is a recent tendency, both within and without institutions of learning, to skim over as many as possible of the latest books. This leaves little or no time for the great books, knowledge of which is essential to a liberal education. In the library of a very up-to-date writer on sociological and economic subjects, I did not find a single book, except a few school texts, written before nineteen hundred. Modern writers all seem to desire to express the movements of the day. But it is difficult to see how one’s judgment of the present can be very sound, if one has no background of the cultural traditions of the race. Ideas of life gained from an exclusive study of the present are necessarily second-rate. Professor John Erskine says, “To live only in the moment, to imagine only one’s own place was once thought to be the fate of the stupid. We have made it the ideal of education.... No college is liberal which trains its students to identify the excellent or the important exclusively with the contemporary.” He says that education should prejudice us in favor of authors who are wise, and that there have not been many great men nor many great ideas. One may acquire a liberal education from the reading of relatively few books. “The Student ... ought to know Hobbes; he ought to know Pascal, and Plato and Bacon and Homer, and Spinoza and Galileo, and Leonardo da Vinci.” And I would add that anyone pursuing his education ought to know Erasmus and Montaigne, Butler’s “Hudibras,” and something of Hume, Voltaire, Anatole France, and the best of the classic poets. This is not a great deal of reading. It can moreover be done in a leisurely manner, and this is important. Our modern habit of cluttering up the mind with all sorts of second-rate, up-to-date printed matter accounts in part for the jumpiness and hectic quality of the modern spirit. No one seems to take time for quiet reflection any more. Everyone is too busy keeping up-to-date, gaining a superficial knowledge of the latest thing, and before we can pause to separate the true from the false in it, it is already out of date and something still more “modern” is the fashion.