oks in these
self-educative processes. A book is at once a carrier and a tool; it
transports the idea and plants it. It is a carrier both in time and in
space--the idea that it implants may be a foreign idea, or an ancient
idea, or both. Either of its functions may for the moment be paramount; a
book may bring to you ideas whose implantation your brain resists, or it
may be used to implant ideas that are already present, as when an
instructor uses his own text book. Neither of these two cases represents
education in the fullest sense.

You will notice that I have not yet defined education. I do not intend to
try, for my time is limited. But in the course of my own educative
processes, which I trust are still proceeding, the tendency grows stronger
and stronger to insist on an intimate connection with reality in all
education--to making it a realization that we are to do something and a
yearning to be able to do it. The man who has never run up against things
as they are, who has lived in a world of moonshine, who sees crooked and
attempts what is impossible and what is useless--is he educated? I used to
wonder what a realist was. Now that I am becoming one myself I begin dimly
to understand. He certainly is not a man devoid of ideals, but they are
real ideals, if you will pardon the bull.

I believe that I am in goodly company. The library as I see it has also
set its face toward the real. What else is meant by our business branches,
our technology rooms, our legislative and municipal reference departments?
They mean that slow as we may be to respond to community thought and to do
our part in carrying on community education, we are vastly more sensitive
than the school, which still turns up its nose at efforts like the Gary
system; than the stage, which still teaches its actors to be stagy instead
of natural; even than the producers of the very literature that we help to
circulate, who rarely know how even to represent the conversation of two
human beings as it really is. And when a great new vehicle of popular
artistic expression arises, like the moving picture, those who purvey it
spend their millions to build mock cities instead of to reproduce the
reality that it is their special privilege to be able to show. And they
hire stage actors to show off their staginess on the screen--staginess
that is a thousand times more stagy because its background is of waving
foliage and glimmering water, instead of the painted canva