EDUCATION
education has to offer. At the same time it is no less clear
that many of those who are able to stay the course of an
academic education emerge from the ordeal either as parrots,
gabbling remembered formulas which they do not really
understand; oj, if they do understand, as specialists, know-
ing everything about one subject and taMng no interest in
anything else; or, finally, as intellectuals, theoretically
knowledgeable about everything, but hopelessly inept in
the affairs of ordinary life. Something analogous happens
to the pupils of technical schools^ They come out into the
world, highly expert in their particular job, but knowing
very little about anything else and having no integrating
principle in terms of which they can arrange and give
. significance to such knowledge as they may subsequently
acquire.
Can these defects in our educational system be remedied ?
I think they can. We must begin by the frankest, the most
objectively scientific acceptance of the fact that human
beings belong to different types. Congeaitally, the cere-
brotonic is not such a egood mixer* as the viscerotonic,
who may be so deeply absorbed in his rich emotional life
as to be unwilling to concern himself with the intellectual
pursuits at which the cerebrotonic excels. Again, the
somatotonic is predestined by his psycho-physical make-up
to be more interested in, and more proficient at, muscular
than intellectual or emotional activity. Or take particular
talents; these, it would seem, are often given and can be
developed only at the expense of other talents. (For
example, good mathematicians are often musical, but very
rarely have any appreciation of the visual arts.) Then
there is the problem—still to some extent the subject of
controversy—of the degrees of intelligence. Intelligence
tests have been improved in recent years; but they will
become fully significant only when the results of the tests
are given in their proper context. The affirmation that
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