The ignorance that counts in a Democracy is educated ignorance. Sometimes it has only been part of the way through the common schools. Sometimes it has one or more university degrees. Sometimes it struts and preens itself as “the scholar in politics.” Only too often it writes books, especially histories, and in the magazines and in the newspapers tells how and for whom we ought to vote. More often than not the very conspicuous members of this ignorant class are full to the overflowing with knowledge, knowledge from books, knowledge from experience, knowledge from travel. No, education--democratic education--is not knowledge. It is not even experience. Profound, deadly, dangerous ignorance is compatible with both. What, then, is ignorance? All its shades and kinds can be so classified as to exclude none who ought to be included, include none who has the right to go free. Is not the dangerous, ignorant man of the Democracy the man who cannot reason, cannot think for himself? What does it mean to think for one’s self? Fortunately, it does not mean original thinking. If that were so there would instantly arise in the world the most contracted and exclusive aristocracy it has ever known. To think for one’s self does not even mean correctly to reason out one’s own conclusions from given premises. That would involve an amount of mental labor from which many brains might shrink. It merely means to be able to follow reasoning that is laid before one; to hear both sides and suspend judgment until both are heard; to recognize which is sound and which fallacious, and upon that independent and clear judgment to accept the true, or rather, to reject the false. A Democracy must breed citizens who think for themselves. Without them it cannot live. With them it cannot die. Hence it follows that in a Democracy education means to cultivate the ability to think for one’s self. Democracy means the right of private judgment. Education in and for a Democracy means development of the capacity to form private judgment. So far as the Democracy is concerned, so far as the equable distribution of rights and liberties is concerned, no education that does not increase reasonableness is of the slightest value. The education that has for its chief aims, its only real aims, culture, refinement, knowledge, learning, may be useful to an aristocracy like Great Britain, to an empire like Germany, to an autocracy like Russia. But it is not only not helpful to but actually hostile to democratic ideas and ideals. It breeds contempt on the one hand, fear and suspicion and hate on the other--the few looking down upon the many, the many looking up at the few. It makes the powerful supercilious. It makes the weak, whether educated or uneducated, helpless. It fills the brain; it does not necessarily strengthen the brain. It _gives_ a man something; it does not compel him to make something of himself.