To change the figure, may their tribe increase. And this is the business of every educator who is not content to be a faker. What we need is not only more education, but a different kind of education. There is more hope in an illiterate community where people hate lying than in a high-school educated nation which reads nothing but trash and is fed up on advertising, newspapers, popular fiction, and propaganda.
In the foregoing chapter, reference was made to our traditional educational systems. The subject is so closely related to the mental habits of democracy that it would be difficult to overemphasize its importance for our study. Traditional educational methods have more often given encouragement to crowd-thinking than to independence of judgment. Thinking has been divorced from doing. Knowledge, instead of being regarded as the foresight of ends to be reached and the conscious direction of activity toward such ends, has been more commonly regarded as the copying of isolated things to be learned. The act of learning has been treated as if it were the passive reception of information imposed from without. The subject to be learned has been sequestered and set apart from experience as a whole, with the result that ideas easily come to be regarded as things in themselves. Systems of thought are built up with little or no sense of their connection with everyday problems. Thus our present-day education prepares in advance both the ready-made logical systems in which the crowd-mind takes refuge from the concretely real and the disposition to accept truth second-hand, upon the authority of another, which in the crowd-man becomes the spirit of conformity.
Even science, taught in this spirit may be destructive of intellectual freedom. Professor Dewey says that while science has done much to modify men's thoughts, still
It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical; it has provided more efficient means for satisfying pre-existent desires rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs....