Dr. Kallen says, “Free public education and private instruction purchasable at a price are both but the community’s device to meet present needs by transmitting the past unchanged. They provide a grammar of assent, not a logic of inquiry. The mental posture they habituate the youth in is not the posture of reflection. The mental posture they habituate the youth in is the posture of conformity. They require belief, not investigation. They impose reverence for the past and idealization of the present. They envision the future as a perpetuation of the past, not as a new creation of it. They are Main Street’s most powerful instrument of self-reproduction without variation.... They enable government both visible and invisible to continue by consent, for they forestall and inhibit in the citizens of the land the technique of doubt and dissent which is the necessary condition of good government and the true inwardness of that eternal vigilance so notoriously the price of liberty.” Here and there, in spite of the system, someone gets his feet on the path which leads to liberal education. But in general it cannot be said that the public school has realized the dreams of those who in the early nineteenth century hoped that free universal education would place democratic institutions on the solid foundations of enlightened public opinion and general respect for truth. It was believed that the curse of ignorance would be removed; that humbug and insolence would be driven from the control of affairs; that labor would be ennobled by understanding, and freedom secured by the attainment of self-mastery. All were now to have access to scholarship; the precious wisdom of the great minds of all times, no longer the possession of the favored few, should be made to live in the daily experience of the nations. We are not so utopian in our hopes for the future of society as were the Humanitarian idealists of the nineteenth century. Perhaps people have expected too much of public education and have required too little. We need not be astonished that the education of the public is committed to a system which becomes an end in itself; that is human. Nor need we be astonished that public education is administered and carried on by persons most of whom do not know what education is; that is the democratic way of dealing with public affairs. If you are to get your education, whoever you are you must not be content to let it be a public affair. You must make it your private affair.