have only to study words with care in order to achieve an apprehension
of life. Indeed, education may be defined as the process of enlarging
the content of words. No two of us speak the same language even though
we use the same words. The schoolboy and the savant speak of education,
using the same word, but the boy has only the faintest conception of the
meaning of the word as used by the savant. We must know the content of
the words that are used before we can understand one another, either in
speaking or in writing. For one man, a word is big with meaning; for
another, the same word is so small as to be well-nigh meaningless. To
the ignorant boor, the word "education" means far less than the three
R's, while to the scholar the word includes languages, ancient and
modern, mathematics through many volumes, sciences that analyze the
dewdrop, determine the weight of the earth and the distances and
movements of the planets, history from the Rosetta Stone to the latest
presidential election, and philosophy from Plato to the scholar of
to-day.

=The word "education."=--And yet both these men spell and pronounce the
word alike. The ignorant man has only the faintest glimmering of the
scholar's meaning of the word when he speaks or writes it. Still the
word is in common use, and people who use it are wont to think that
their conception of its meaning is universal. If the boor could follow
the expansion of the word as it is invested with greater and greater
content, he would, in time, understand Aristotle, Shakespeare,
Gladstone, and Max Müller. And, understanding these men, he would come
to know philosophy, literature, and language, and so would come to
appreciate more fully what education really is. In contemplating the
expansion of the word, one might easily visualize the ever widening
circle produced by throwing a pebble into a pool; but a better
conception would be the expansion of a balloon when it is being