In this respect, it seems to me, Great Britain has had the advantage. Many of her greatest contributions to science and philosophy came from outside the regular university faculties. Such men as Hobbes, Milton, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Spencer, Mill and Darwin may have received conventional training, but they went out and did something with it afterwards. They helped create an ideal of the educated man which we have yet to gain. Hence Great Britain has had many amateur scholars who were also men of affairs, men like Mr. Balfour and the Haldanes, whose influence has helped keep education from being over-professionalized. Some of the highest educational attainments in history have been reached without the setting up of any institution at all, in our sense of the term. Protagoras, Socrates, and Abelard simply gathered groups of fellow students about them who lived for years in their company, first as disciples then as assistants. Such education to be sure was for the selected few, but after a man had spent some time with his teacher, he acquired a philosophy which changed his way of life. The modern attempt to educate everyone really educates hardly anyone. The public school imparts a certain elementary instruction--in eight or ten years about as much as a normally intelligent youth could master in two years if he set his mind to it. In matters of taste and standards of value, public school education makes little difference; or in developing thirst for knowledge, tolerance, independence of judgment. The task of giving instruction to the youth of an entire community is so great that thoroughness is almost impossible. The task falls to the state, and the state is a vested interest and the protector of other vested interests, interests which are not always consistent with the desire for knowledge. There are factions in the community which the public authorities must conciliate. We have seen what can happen to the teaching of biology and history when such factions become organized to control the public education of a state. Public servants are nowhere eager to have education so free to pursue its proper function that there is developed an alert and critically minded public to whom they must justify certain of their practices. What the state desires of education is soldiers, reliable voters, law-abiding citizens, contented working men, prosperous traders. Hence a spirit of docility and credulity, often of timidity, prevails in the school.