Finally, it is hoped that adult education will give us new methods and aims which will be carried back into our schools and colleges and transform them. A better informed adult population will naturally take a more active and intelligent interest in the education of youth. And when teachers try to instruct adults it will become necessary for them to make their teaching interesting and significant. The teachers will also learn something about life, gleaning sheaves of ripe wisdom out of the mature experience of their students; they will become better teachers. All this may or may not come to pass. The point of interest is that there is this tendency to make a gospel of education. We Americans have a weakness for new gospels. They are a pleasant form of verbal exercise. Liberty, Democracy, Social Reform, the Cause of Labor, Psychoanalysis--all have been put to such evangelistic use. Now we are to become an educated nation by the simple process of everyone educating everyone else. Education is like reform, it is something which is always good for other people. There is much talk about adult education and there are many conferences. But I have not attended a conference for the discussion of this subject in which anyone spoke of adult education as his own pursuit of knowledge. And as with most gospels, we are in such a hurry to save souls that we would begin proclaiming the new salvation to the nation before pausing to find out what education is. Education has one thing in common with religion. One must come to it with clean hands and a pure heart or one can never know the secret power of it. This is as true of a nation as of an individual. As a people we have certain traits which may be praiseworthy in themselves, but are distinctly hostile to the work of education. I will enumerate them and then briefly indicate their element of hostility. They are, first, our genius for organization; second, our well-known utilitarianism; third, our cleverness in finding shortcuts to the ends we seek; and fourth, our tendency to make propaganda. The American way of doing things is to proceed to organize them. Our genius for organization is probably our most generally recognized national characteristic. It has given us such prestige as we enjoy among the nations of the earth. Ours is the land of the Woolworth Building, the Ford factories, the Anti-saloon League, Rotary, the Ku Klux Klan, and the college cheer leader. In organization there is power and there is efficiency, as seen in the success of our industries. Labor, politics, morals, religion, charity have all followed the same course. In fact a man gains recognition in this country only by virtue of his membership in some power-seeking group. He who remains unorganized is lost. And without a chairman, a committee, an executive secretary and a press agent no human interest can survive. We simply do not know what to do with it or how to think about it.