thought associations common to your group. I suspect that it was when they got
around to interpreting the art of the Tower of Babel, its architecture, its
educational or its social significance, that the people discovered that each was
speaking in an unknown tongue, incomprehensible to the others. Words are uncertain
containers of meaning. Their cubic content differs with differing habits of
thought and use. We become addicts of our own terminologies. The bridges of
communication between one profession and another are of limited capacity. We

have difficulty in getting the significant essense of our meanings across to each
other.

I have chosen, therefore, to write out and mimeograph what I am going to
say. If it happens to stimulate a responding vibration which calls for reflection
on your part, you can get a copy after I'm through. That will enable you at
your leisure to ferret out the more obscure meanings which seem to have possible
significance to your own thinking. And you may then forgive me for following a
manuscript.

There's one other consideration. I must speak with only a lay person's
knowledge of modern education, Laymen as we are, we are proud of American
education, of its freedom in a world of dictated ideologies. We take our hats
off to its liberal spirit, its desire to make sound and healthy progress.

An outsider cannot look at all closely at education today without noting
the unrest expressed in its experimental schools, its progressive education
conferences, its adult education movements. Its exponents are engaged in
critical self-analysis. Its Kilpatricks and Deweys, its army of research experi-
menters, give it almost the steam shovel and open ditch aspect of a W.P.A. field
project. When volunteering comment or suggestion, an onlooker cannot be sure
that the very thing he proposes may not already be going forward over in the

next excavation.