The men come to think of learning as something to be added to the end of
a hard day's work, and to be gained at the cost of toilsome mental
exertion. There are, of course, exceptions, but many men who persist in
attending classes and lectures year after year find themselves possessed
of a mass of inert knowledge which nothing in their experience fuses
into availability or realization.

Among the many disappointments which the settlement experiment has
brought to its promoters, perhaps none is keener than the fact that they
have as yet failed to work out methods of education, specialized and
adapted to the needs of adult working people in contra-distinction to
those employed in schools and colleges, or those used in teaching
children. There are many excellent reasons and explanations for this
failure. In the first place, the residents themselves are for the most
part imbued with academic methods and ideals, which it is most difficult
to modify. To quote from a late settlement report, "The most vaunted
educational work in settlements amounts often to the stimulation
mentally of a select few who are, in a sense, of the academic type of
mind, and who easily and quickly respond to the academic methods
employed." These classes may be valuable, but they leave quite untouched
the great mass of the factory population, the ordinary workingman of the
ordinary workingman's street, whose attitude is best described as that
of "acquiescence," who lives through the aimless passage of the years
without incentive "to imagine, to design, or to aspire." These men are
totally untouched by all the educational and philanthropic machinery
which is designed for the young and the helpless who live on the same
streets with them. They do not often drink to excess, they regularly
give all their wages to their wives, they have a vague pride in their
superior children; but they grow prematurely old and stiff in all their
muscles, and become more and more taciturn, their entire energies