The whole conception of education as primarily a process of handing on the intelligence that we possess is an error. For intelligence is not a deposit that one can possess; it is not composed of particular mental acts and habits; endeavor to possess it, and you gather to yourself ashes and smoking embers--the flame has escaped you. Under the surface of contemporary education these two irreconcilables are already in conflict. We are beginning to see that the prime function of schools is to put the young into possession of methods for inquiry and for testing. And in the light of this function we are beginning to ask, What is it to teach patriotism, or religious loyalty, or social-mindedness? The result is conflict that goes deeper than a contest between two finished views of the state or of the church or of social organization. It is a contest between two opposed ways of acquiring and holding views, opposed ways of dealing with standards, of handling ever-rising new issues, of choosing our loyalties. The effect of making education an instrument whereby the wisdom of a departing generation shall control the arriving one never is what the theory of it calls for. Theoretically, the impartially selected best in contemporary civilization should be transmitted; actually some sort of partizanship is propagated. A state school in Canada and one in the United States, though they be within sight of each other, do not develop a common rationality in respect to either of the two countries or in respect to Great Britain. The teaching of what is called patriotism is the inculcation of partizanship and of the closed mind. There is nothing in it that enables pupils to discriminate between different varieties of patriotism, or that prepares them for a possibly unprecedented type. Religious education in the church school, likewise, is partizan. It is directed towards the perpetuation of a specific loyalty, not towards the capacity and the habit of weighing loyalties. Even if Christians already have the truth, this does not justify partizan methods in teaching it; for the truth, one would guess, requires no special privilege. Indeed, it is worth asking whether partizanship on behalf of a good thing does not always obscure its goodness. Would it be un-Christian so to teach the young that they should freshly and freely weigh Christianity and its alternatives, my denomination and other denominations, our civilization and other actual or possible ones? Because we do not thus educate we have churches that have no technic for correcting their corporate errors, no technic for squarely meeting new situations, no technic for getting denominations together even when these denominations know that they ought to do it. Moreover, no just balance is held between majorities and minorities in the churches, or between laymen and clergy or clerical officers.