52 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis 
cheaply can you buy it? And the pathetic thing is we 
are cheating ourselves out of the best things in life 
because we cannot or will not look at anything but today. 
The immediate results you see about you. Gone are 
the days when the little boy listened to fairy stories at 
his mother’s knee. Gone are the days when grand- 
mamma gave the little girl her first lessons in knitting. 
We send our children to school that they may be made 
into hothouse plants and into walking dictionaries of 
information because the school system is a most excel- 
lent one. Excellent in that it encourages reasoning in 
the child at a time when it is largely memory, and seeks 
to educate a memory when it ought to be taught to think 
straight. If the survival of man has been determined 
largely by his appreciation of what has occurred in the 
past and his ability to look into the future, might it not 
be well to see to it that the educated man appreciates the 
factors which go to make up the environment which must 
be modified to render possible his survival? We seek to 
justify the usefulness of our education. We publish sta- 
tistics on how much more a college graduate can earn 
than one who has only finished high school. Are we 
really concerned with the happiness and the reasonable- 
ness in a life which a knowledge of cultural subjects car- 
ries with it? Twenty years ago a certain college prest- 
dent went out gunning for students that his educational 
institution might show the increasing thirst for learning 
before a legislature. Today the same college president 
talks about the unwieldiness of the overgrown college 
and seeks to keep young people out. Think of the long 
time a child must spend under the enforced artificialities 
of life before he attains his legal age. Think of the daily 
growing resentment on the part of parents that children 
imitate them. Think of forming organizations which 
