om the environment
around them, and consequently they become victims of this superstition
from the outset. As a trainer of teachers, I hold it to be one important
part of my duty to fortify my students as strongly as I can against this
false standard of which my engineer friend is the victim. It is just as
much a part of my duty to give my students effective and consistent
standards of what a good living consists in as it is to give them the
technical knowledge and skill that will enable them to make a good
living. If my students who are to become teachers have standards of
living and standards of success that are inconsistent with the great
ideal of social service for which teaching stands, then I have fallen
far short of success in my work. If they are constantly irritated by the
evidences of luxury beyond their means, if this irritation sours their
dispositions and checks their spontaneity, their efficiency as teachers
is greatly lessened or perhaps entirely negated. And if my engineer
friend places worldly emoluments upon a higher plane than professional
efficiency, I dread for the safety of the bridges that he builds. His
education as an engineer should have fortified him against just such a
contingency. It should have left him with the ideal of craftsmanship
supreme in his life. And if his technical education failed to do this,
his general education ought, at least, to have given him a bias in the
right direction.

I believe that all forms of vocational and professional education are
not so strong in this respect as they should be. Again you say to me,
What can education do when the spirit of the times speaks so strongly on
the other side? But what is education for if it is not to preserve midst
the chaos and confusion of troublous times the great truths that the
race has wrung from its experience? How different might have been the
fate of Rome, if Rome had possessed an educational system touching every
child in the Empire, and if, during the years that witnessed her decay
and downfall, those schools could have kept steadily, persistently at
work, impressing upon every member of each successive generation the
virtues that made the old Romans strong and virile--the virtues that
enabled them to lay the foundations of an empire that crumbled in ruins
once these truths were forgotten. Is it not the specific task of
education to represent in each generation the human experiences that
have been tried and tested and foun