f their national Promise by means of
politically, economically, and socially reconstructive work has forced
them into the alternative of attaching excessive importance to
subsidized good intentions. They want to be "uplifted," and they want to
"uplift" other people; but they will not use their social and political
institutions for the purpose, because those institutions are assumed to
be essentially satisfactory. The "uplifting" must be a matter of
individual, or of unofficial associated effort; and the only available
means are words and subsidies.

There is, however, a sense in which it is really true that the American
national Promise can be fulfilled only by education; and this aspect of
our desirable national education can, perhaps, best be understood by
seeking its analogue in the training of the individual. An individual's
education consists primarily in the discipline which he undergoes to fit
him both for fruitful association with his fellows and for his own
special work. Important as both the liberal and the technical aspect of
this preliminary training is, it constitutes merely the beginning of a
man's education. Its object is or should be to prepare him both in his
will and in his intelligence to make a thoroughly illuminating use of
his experience in life. His experience,--as a man of business, a
husband, a father, a citizen, a friend,--has been made real to him, not
merely by the zest with which he has sought it and the sincerity with
which he has accepted it, but by the disinterested intelligence which he
has brought to its understanding. An educational discipline which has
contributed in that way to the reality of a man's experience has done as
much for him as education can do; and an educational discipline which
has failed to make any such contribution has failed of its essential
purpose. The experience of other people acquired at second hand has
little value,--except, perhaps, as a means of livelihood,--unless it
really illuminates a man's personal experience.

Usually a man's ability to profit by his own personal experience depends
upon the sincerity and the intelligence which he brings to his own
particular occupation. The rule is not universal, because some men are,
of course, born with much higher intellectual gifts than others; and to
such men may be given an insight which has little foundation in any
genuine personal experience. It remains true, none the less, for the
great majority of men, that