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 CHAPTER IX

THE EDUCATION OF THE ADULT

it be granted that it is the interest and the duty of a nation to develop the intelligence of its people, we must conclude that the work is only half done, or not half done, by even an ideal system of what is commonly called education. I am assuming that a time will come when no youth or maiden will enter workshop or office before the age of seventeen, if not eighteen; and that the better endowed minority of our children will, without regard to their private resources, be promoted to secondary, technical, and higher schools. This minority will, on the whole, need no further attention. Cultural interest and professional stimulation will ensure that their studies continue. But the majority will fall lamentably short of the ideal of developed and alert intelligence. The added three or four years will be enormously valuable to the teacher, but in the majority of cases the intellectual interest will still be so feeble that the distractions of life will at once extinguish it.

If we speak of our actual world, not of an ideal world, this fact is too patent to need proving.