WE ARE not apologizing for pointing out the elementary and the obvious. It is easy enough after the fact for readers to say that all this is simple and evident. We are in good company when we hold that the elementary may be deeply fundamental and the obvious may be overlooked entirely. And, alas, both may be dismissed with a cynical So what? Sociologists make much of the concept of cultural lag. They take pains, for exampleand rightly-to show how far the educational system is behind the times. And they industriously go about their business, unmindful of the tremendous cultural lag in their own educational bailiwick. They acquire a peculiar professional ethnocentrism, an ethnocentrism that is lost sight of in the study of other occupational and professional folkways-or folk-ruts when looked at from the point of view of cultural lag. While the backwardness in college teaching reflects the lag in the entire school set-up, this backwardness is more pronounced in the colleges and universities than in the grade schools and high schools. We take great pains nowadays to train persons to teach in the grade schools, but we scarcely bother to prepare persons to teach on the college level. We step up the standards and qualifications for grade school teaching in an effort to get the best possible teaching personalities. But we let almost anyone, as long as he shows a certain kind of scholarly ability, instruct college students. Colleges can learn much from grade schools, as we shall note presently, and one lesson would be in the field of teacher training. Sociologists are educationally backward in a number of ways: training of teachers, teaching methods, textbooks, collateral readings, use of the cinema and radio, and notably, visual education. Some of us are mindful of the situation and take steps to remedy it; most of us, engrossed in larger duties, pay no heed, in fact may wax indignant when charged with educational negligence. In a time like ours when the social world is very much out of joint, when it is dangerously near the breaking point, sociology should be a much stronger cohesive force than it actually is. It is up to us to make sociology come to life for the student and for the common man outside the college campus. In Dwight Sanderson's words, we must make Sociology a Means to Democracy. Our lopsided emphasis on research and publication to the neglect of instruction and guidance -is notorious, and some college educators have decried it at length.' We go so far as to consider our students as guinea pigs for our special research purposes rather than as personalities in need of counsel and enlightenment. One might well ask this question of research fanatics in our midst: Are we to use students in order to accumulate researches in our own name, or are we to serve the educational needs of students? Voices have been raised among us against our indiscriminate piling up of heaps of research, much of which, it is asserted, is sheer rubbish.2 But these are lone voices and cry unheeded. The research pace goes dizzily on. While we do not preach the slogan Research for Research's Sake, we nevertheless practice the maxim Research for the Researcher's Sake. Everyone in our profession knows that mediocre research is more likely to win promotion than excellent teaching. It is high time that we take stock of ourselves as teachers even if we have to review fundamentals we are all supposed to know. What will be said below is concerned primarily with the more elementary courses in sociology and with classroom teaching. But