e, nor to handle, nor to create, but to remember. He
is, moreover, to remember not his own realities, but the written or
spoken ideas of others. He is dragged through a wilderness of grammar,
with thickets of diacritical marks, into the desert of metaphysics. He
is taught to do right, not because right action is in the nature of
things, the nature of himself and the things about him, but because he
will be punished somehow if he does not.

He is given a medley of words without ideas. He is taught declensions
and conjugations without number in his own and other tongues. He
learns things easily by rote; so his teachers fill him with
rote-learning. Hence, grammar and language have become stereotyped as
teaching without a thought as to whether undigested words may be
intellectual poison. And as the good heart depends on the good brain,
undigested ideas become moral poison as well. No one can tell how much
of the bad morals and worse manners of the conventional college boy of
the past has been due to intellectual dyspepsia from undigested words.

In such manner the child is bound to lose his orientation as to the
forces which surround him. If he does not recover it, he will spend
his life in a world of unused fancies and realities. Nonsense will
seem half truth, and his appreciation of truth will be vitiated by lack
of clearness of definition--by its close relation to nonsense.

That this is no slight defect can be shown in every community. There
is no intellectual craze so absurd as not to have a following among
educated men and women. There is no scheme for the renovation of the
social order so silly that educated men will not invest their money in
it. There is no medical fraud so shameless that educated men will not
give it their certificate. There is no nonsense so unscientific that
men called educated will not accept it as science.

It should be a function of the schools to build up common sense. Folly
should be crowded out of the schools. We have furnished costly lunatic
asylums for its accommodation. That our schools are in a degree
responsible for current follies, there can be no doubt. We have many
teachers who have never seen a truth in their lives. There are many
who have never felt the impact of an idea. There are many who have
lost their own orientation in their youth, and who have never since
been able to point out the sunrise to others. It is no extravagance of
language to say that diac