Information is a kind of skill. Everyone can possess this skill to the extent he chooses, and people do not resent an exhibition of unusual skill of such a nature. In America most men and boys have some measure of skill at the game of baseball, so this game is the popular national form of sport. The skillful professional ball-player is simply one of the common boyhood ideals realized. He differs from the spectators of the game in degree, but not in kind. He plays the same game they all played, and is the same sort of person they all were as boys--only more so. So with most kinds of information, the amount one may acquire makes only a quantitative difference, not a difference in kind. But as a man becomes educated he discovers that he is playing a new game; he is becoming a different kind of person, with different likes and dislikes, different interests, different ideals and faiths, and such beliefs as he has he holds differently. What the multitude most fears in education is the danger that the crowd faith will be lost in the process. This fear is often justified. Old beliefs will be lost and they should be. The fear appears in consciousness as solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the person being educated. It is really anxiety over the menace of education to herd living and thinking. It is the function of education to lure the individual out of the pack and give him opportunity to know his own mind, a thing he can never do so long as he runs and barks and bites along with all the rest. To return to Plato’s figure, every person who climbs out of the cave not only loses his own faith in the reality of shadows but weakens the faith of those who remain behind. Cave men make strenuous efforts to resist education. Their common practice is to maintain their own systems of pseudo education in which no one is permitted to turn his eyes away from the wall.