From some of the current concepts of education one would infer that in the school and college world at least minorities must be flourishingly performing their indispensable functions. One would expect students to obtain a material part of their training in rationality from belonging to this or that minority, and from the reciprocal modification of majorities and minorities by each other. Some experience of this kind is had, in fact, in self-government schemes of some sorts; yet it appears that the educational possibilities of majority-minority situations are rarely worked out either by pupils acting alone or by pupils acting under the guidance of supervisors. Instead of the learning of deficiencies and the enlargement of horizon that should result from the interplay of groups, we find, too often, cock-crowing by the victorious majority and a sense of futility upon the part of the defeated minority. This in the elementary and secondary schools. When we come to the colleges, we find conditions even worse. The majority-minority relations are so irrational that anything more ominous for the future of society can scarcely be found. “Campus customs,” often trivial, sometimes offensive, are enforced upon every last student with the ruthlessness of a Czarist régime. If one refuses, say, to wear a green cap, one is thrown into water or otherwise manhandled; or, if physical penalties have been abolished, there are psychical penalties not less compelling. The faculty of a certain college is proud to have rooted physical violence completely out of the campus; yet on the same campus there is a law that a freshman must deliver a match to any upper-class man who demands one, and another law permits any upper-class man to examine the socks that any freshman is wearing. “What would happen to a freshman who refused to submit to these laws?” a visitor asked. The reply was that if he persisted in his disobedience life would be made so miserable for him that he would leave college. The visitor asked again, “What would happen if a freshman sent to the college paper a dignified communication in opposition to these customs?” The editor answered that the communication would not be printed, but that if it were printed the writer would suffer the penalty. The quality of such campus laws must be judged by the effects upon both those who command and those who obey. The pain, physical or mental, even though it amount to cruelty, is not the worst of the matter, by any means. A deeper wound by far is inflicted upon the perpetrators themselves through the closing of their minds to thought and to the conditions of rational social existence. Where minorities have no voice, the mind of the majority decays. Perhaps the clearest sign of what really happens here is the sheepish submissiveness of the minority, and the salving of its sores by the thought that next year one will have the privilege of tormenting somebody else.