The average child starts in life with a question mark at the tip of every sense. Why does this inquisitiveness gradually disappear or become perverted into curiosity about trivialities? Why does going to school become a burden? Why are so many classes at college listless and inattentive? Why does the light, the frivolous, the thoughtless attract and hold, while that which is in reality far more interesting wearies and repels? Is it not because this reasoning faculty is allowed to grow up “any which way,” and is discouraged or suppressed wherever memory or some other form of some one’s else ideas can be substituted? Is it not because to reason comes to seem a burden, a bore, a pain? Would that be so if education were rightly based, rightly built? We Americans reason better, perhaps, than any other nation about a wider range of affairs; probably not with so much depth as some other peoples, but certainly with greater clearness. But this is due to a compulsory training almost altogether outside of the schoolroom. It is due to Democracy, that compels the mind to grow as Spring’s sunshine compels the seed. As our affairs, both public and private, have grown more complex, the defects due to this haphazard education of the reasoning faculty, this treatment of it almost as if it were a weed, become more and more apparent, more and more in need of correction. Common sense is looked upon as a gift of the gods, a sort of intuition. Is it not in reality merely the result of a somewhat better natural or acquired reasoning faculty? Ought not common sense to be the attainable possession of every American? And where but the schoolhouse is the place to obtain this possession, this means to self-rule, to freedom, to the full splendor of the noblest of human ideals, Democracy? In a Democracy the school should not be the temple of knowledge. It should be the temple of reason. And it shall be! And that day will be a sad one for charlatanism and for charlatans. CHAPTER XII A NATION OF DREAMERS