“Adult Education” is becoming a slogan, a phrase to capitalize, a label to attach to various activities which have hitherto borne other brands,--Americanization for instance, or social work, or community organization, or reforms and propagandas of one sort or another. Much that is now labeled Adult Education has a curiously familiar look. There are faces one has seen before somewhere in other climes that then enjoyed the sunshine of popular interest. Praiseworthy enterprises no doubt, and not less praiseworthy is the somewhat tardy discovery that the organizers have all along been speaking the prose of adult education without knowing it. The danger is that persons with long experience in promoting and administering many things may also conceive of each educational task as primarily one of organization. In a recent conference on adult education in a New England state, an enthusiastic public school administrator in a burst of oratory proposed that adult education be made compulsory. Another called attention to the appalling extent of illiteracy, particularly as regards the use of the English language, and urged that adult education be promoted as a preventive of crime. A third, a dean in an eastern college, insisted that adult education at once be departmentalized; graded, I suppose, into its primary, secondary, collegiate and post-graduate branches. Nothing has yet been said about an adult kindergarten, though doubtless many people could profit by attending such an institution. Perhaps the associated kindergartens have not yet discovered the fact that they also have been engaged in adult education. We shall be disappointed if it is our hope to send the grown-up population of the country back to Public School to receive still more of the thing that caused many of them to leave. One of the leading educators in America recently asked a group of teachers whether any among them were so well satisfied with what they had accomplished in their own sphere that they could wish to extend their work through the adult years. It is very difficult for the man of the system to think of education itself, he is too much preoccupied with gradations, requirements, discipline, reports, with seeing that a given minimum of identical work is done by all in a given time. He thinks in terms of buildings and equipment, submission to authority, conformity to herd opinion, service to the state. All or at least some of these things are necessary, but it is obvious that they do not constitute an education. This lesson America has got to learn. There can be no quantity production of the things of the spirit.