That education in a so-called democracy may be official and professionalized and at the same time superficial and illiberal is manifest. Thomas Davidson, a pioneer teacher of adults in this country, expressed great hope in the promise of public education in America. But there is one fact about such intellectual life as there is in this country which seems to have escaped Davidson’s attention, I suppose because his own case was an exception. It is a fact which I believe may be one of the causes of the small influence which learning exerts in the daily life and thought and preferences of our people. Thousands of people say that their education is of no use to them in later years. It is an interest which they do not keep up but leave behind at the school-house door. They think that education belongs properly in the school, and except for some practical advantage most people seldom think of making any cultural achievement of their own outside the school. Most advance in scholarship in this country is the work of professionals, members of university faculties. Outside the institutions of learning, there is very little independent creative thought. Exception must be made of our literary men, but these too are professionals. There are almost no men of leisure who carry on the progress of civilization as educated amateurs. In this respect we are much like Germany before the war, where advance in scholarship was almost confined to the universities and the attempt was made to create knowledge by the machinery of organized research. An example of the situation in our country is to be found in the fact that almost every member of the American Philosophical Association is a Ph.D. and a teacher of philosophy in a degree-granting institution. It might almost be said that philosophy, beyond the merest introduction to the subject, is studied in order that students may become teachers of still other teachers. I suspect that a similar situation exists in other learned societies. This confinement of scholarship to the professional student leaves the public without guidance and at the mercy of quacks. It causes a break between education and other interests which the public school strives in vain to bridge over, because in such a situation the school itself becomes official and sequestered. Thus education is constantly being done up in little packages and sent out from the places where it is grown, like the garden seeds which Congressmen used to send to their constituents and which nobody planted. Education does not take root because nobody plants it. People think that culture is the special function of the professional gardeners, and there are even educators who would be astonished and jealous if they saw anything but elementary scholarship growing at large outside their walls.