Some one has recently said: college public is fed up with purely local experiments, plans, and picnics; fed up with individual showmanship and absorption of the public interest. A new college 'plan' attracts about as little attention today as does a passing car. We trust that the above statement exaggerates the situation somewhat, but we are sure that it points in the direction of certain well-recognized facts-the widespread dissatisfaction with former educational methods, and the consequent attempts to improve them. There have been great and sadly needed searchings of heart in higher education in this country during the past two decades, and unnumbered honest efforts have been made to render a more efficient service. Professor Winm. B. Munro relates an incident out of his experience when, as a young man, he was teaching economics in a small college. He thought it would be well for the students to be familiar at first hand with some of the economic writers, and he assigned reading for the purpose. This was strongly resented by the students, and one of them said to him that, frankly, they did not think they were being treated fairly; that, as they understood it, Professor Monro was paid a salary by the college to read these books and tell the students what was in them, and now he was expecting them to read the books themselves. We may not be agreed about a definition of education or the ideal method of educating students, but, as citizens of a democracy, we believe in education, and we give a note of reality to our faith by spending vast sums annually for this purpose. Democracy demands education. Democracy and ignorance spell danger and disaster in capital letters. The art or science of education has not been fully mastered, and we recognize that the same education is not equally good for all people. We are pretty well agreed that the right kind of education has moral and intellectual discipline as its goal, that the word thoroughness is still the most important word in the teacher's vocabulary, that self-discipline is of more consequence than the subject which is being studied. The way the work is done is of more importance than what the work is. The student is no longer the passive recipient of the teacher's bountiful store of wisdom, nor is he merely a machine to reproduce from memory the contents of a textbook. Education is an active, not a passive, process; and the more active it is, the more permanent the effects. Knowledge, particularly when acquired without effort, is apt to vanish; but the habit of intellectual industry, of hard thinking, of discovering and solving problems, remains and fructifies without end. In other words, the more self-education is developed, the better.