There is a tendency among very modern educators to reduce book learning to a minimum. It is said that book knowledge is only hear-say, second-hand information. The student does not make a fact his own so long as he must take someone’s word for it. What books tell you prevents your finding out for yourself. You know an emotion only when you feel it, a fact when you deal with it, a truth when you discover it. “We learn by doing.” A leading progressive educator says, “The school of tomorrow is going to get away from mere reciting what has been got from books. That is, we are going to give up the notion that the school is the place where we assign certain set tasks and the child goes off and prepares those things and then comes back to convince us that he has done what was required.... In the school of the future, the child is going to live, really live. This means what he learns he learns because he needs it then and there.” This rather extreme form of protest against formal book learning is really an attempt to correct the opposite extreme. We all know persons, conventionally educated, who substitute reading for living, and the book for reality. There are those who never talk about events or ideas, but always quote what some book says about them, as if they believed that work, love, joy, pain, became fit subjects of contemplation only in print. The world of actions and things gives way to a world of words only. Human existence becomes a sort of grown-up children’s game of authors. Education becomes an evasion of the challenge of real situations. Emotion and fancy are exhausted in doing nothing. It becomes preferable to read about things than to experience them. The individual thinks he has acquired wisdom; he merely has a taste for reading and a good memory. In these days when educators are frantically striving to find some new method of teaching which will save democracy from mediocrity, it is the habit to blame the older education for any and all intellectual futility. I believe, however, that futile persons would be ineffective no matter what the method of instruction. The statement quoted above to the effect that in the schools of the future the children are going to live and are to stop reciting required lessons and learn what they need “here and now,” is a little like the platitude that one can learn more out of life than out of books, a saying which always flatters the illiterate. It seems to be thoroughly modern to believe that the best way to get an education is to stop studying and just _live_,--whatever that is.