hy. But we
shall not merely make beasts of ourselves; which is the nearest popular
definition for merely following the laws of Nature and cowering under
the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains much moonshine; but not
of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots the slaves of a silver
magnet, the one eye of the world. In this decent arena there are fads,
but not frenzies. Doubtless we shall often find a mare's nest; but it
will not always be the nightmare's.

*****

IV. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION

When a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education, a
certain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken by
the superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickened
of sacred words and wearied of theology, if this largely unreasoning
irritation against "dogma" did arise out of some ridiculous excess of
such things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be laying up
a fine crop of cant for our descendants to grow tired of. Probably the
word "education" will some day seem honestly as old and objectless as
the word "justification" now seems in a Puritan folio. Gibbon thought
it frightfully funny that people should have fought about the difference
between the "Homoousion" and the "Homoiousion." The time will come when
somebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered against Sectarian
Education and also against Secular Education; that men of prominence and
position actually denounced the schools for teaching a creed and also
for not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in Gibbon look rather
alike; but they really mean quite different things. Faith and creed do
not look alike, but they mean exactly the same thing. Creed happens to
be the Latin for faith.

Now having read numberless newspaper articles on education, and
even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and
indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I
was born, about whether religion was part of education, about whether
hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was
inconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered much on this
recurring substantive, and I am ashamed to say that it was comparatively
late in life that I saw the main fact about it.

Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing.
It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word
like geology, soldiering is a word lik