ted tabloids that convince one
that he knows more than he really does. Thus the unsuspecting adult goes
on reading what he does not understand, not now thinking that it does not
matter, but falsely persuaded that he has become competent to understand.

Every one of the agencies that I have named aims to do good educational
work; every one is competent to do such work; nearly every one does much
of it. I am finding fault with them only so far as they succeed in
persuading readers that they are better educated than they really are. In
this respect such agencies are precisely on a par with the proprietary
medicine that is an excellent laxative or sudorific, but is offered also
as a cure for tuberculosis or cancer.

I once heard the honoured head of a famous body that does an enormous
amount of work of this sort deliver an _apologia_, deserving of all
attention, in which he complained that his institution had been falsely
accused of superficiality. It was, he said, perfectly honest in what it
taught. If its pupils thought that the elementary knowledge they were
gaining was comprehensive and thorough, that was their fault--not his. And
vet, at that moment, the institution was posing before its pupils as a
"university" and using the forms and nomenclature of such a body to
strengthen the idea in their minds. We cannot acquit it, or any of the
agencies like it, of complicity in the causation of the malady whose
symptoms we are discussing.

It is not the fault of the women's clubs that they have fallen into line
in such an imposing procession as this. Their formation and work
constitute one of the most interesting and important manifestations of the
present feminist movement. Their role in it is partly social, partly
educational; and as they consist of adults, elementary education is of
course excluded from their programme. We therefore find them committed,
perhaps unconsciously, to the plan of required or recommended reading, in
a form that has long been the bane of our educational systems both in
school and out.

One of the corner-stones of this system is the idea that the acquisition
of information is valuable in itself, no matter what may be the
relationship between it and the acquiring mind, or what use of it may be
made in the future. According to this idea, if a woman can once get into
her head that the Medici were a family and not "a race of people," it
matters little that she is unfitted to comprehend why they are w