l knowledge that you have gained
in this institution, to hold up the standard of courtesy and helpfulness
under which you can best do public service, confident that if you do these
things, business standing and financial success will also be added unto
you.

HOW THE COMMUNITY EDUCATES ITSELF[15]

[15] Read before the American Library Association, Asbury Park,
N.J., June 27, 1916.

In endeavoring to distinguish between self-education and education by
others, one meets with considerable difficulty. If a boy reads Mill's
"Political Economy'" he is surely educating himself; but if after reading
each chapter he visits a class and answers certain questions propounded
for the purpose of ascertaining whether he has read it at all, or has read
it understandingly, then we are accustomed to transfer the credit for the
educative process to the questioner, and say that the boy has been
educated at school or college. As a matter of fact, I think most of us are
self-educated. Not only is most of what an adult knows and can do,
acquired outside of school, but in most of what he learned even there he
was self-taught. His so-called teachers assigned tasks to him and saw that
he performed them. If he did not, they subjected him to discipline. Once
or twice in a lifetime most of us have run up against a real teacher--a
man or a woman that really played a major part in shaping our minds as
they now are--our stock of knowledge, our ways of thought, our methods of
doing things. These men have stood and are still standing (though they may
have joined the great majority long ago) athwart the stream of sensation
as it passes through us, and are determining what part shall be stored up,
and where; what kind of action shall ultimately result from it. The
influence of a good teacher spreads farther and lasts longer than that of
any other man. If his words have been recorded in books it may reach
across the seas and down the ages.

There is another reason why the distinction between school education and
self-education breaks down. If the boy with whom we began had any teacher
at all it was John Stuart Mill, and this man was his teacher whether or
not his reading of the book was prescribed and tested in a class-room. I
would not have you think that I would abolish schools and colleges. I wish
we had more of the right kind, but the chief factor in educative
acquirement will still be the pupil.

So when the community educates