need above all is _education_. It is quite true that what we need is
education, but something so different from what now passes as such
that it needs a new name.

Education has more various aims than we usually recognize, and should
of course be judged in relation to the importance of its several
intentions, and of its success in gaining them. The arts of reading
and writing and figuring all would concede are basal in a world of
newspapers and business. Then there is technical information and the
training that prepares one to earn a livelihood in some more or less
standardized guild or profession. Both these aims are reached fairly
well by our present educational system, subject to various economies
and improvements in detail. Then there are the studies which it is
assumed contribute to general culture and to "training the mind", with
the hope of cultivating our tastes, stimulating the imagination, and
mayhap improving our reasoning powers.

This branch of education is regarded by the few as very precious and
indispensable; by the many as at best an amenity which has little
relation to the real purposes and success of life. It is highly
traditional and retrospective in the main, concerned with ancient
tongues, old and revered books, higher mathematics, somewhat archaic
philosophy and history, and the fruitless form of logic which has
until recently been prized as man's best guide in the fastnesses of
error. To these has been added in recent decades a choice of the
various branches of natural science.

The results, however, of our present scheme of liberal education are
disappointing. One who, like myself, firmly agrees with its objects
and is personally so addicted to old books, so pleased with such