You will notice that I have not yet defined education.  I do not intend to try, for my time is limited.  But in the course of my own educative processes, which I trust are still proceeding, the tendency grows stronger and stronger to insist on an intimate connection with reality in all education—­to making it a realization that we are to do something and a yearning to be able to do it.  The man who has never run up against things as they are, who has lived in a world of moonshine, who sees crooked and attempts what is impossible and what is useless—­is he educated?  I used to wonder what a realist was.  Now that I am becoming one myself I begin dimly to understand.  He certainly is not a man devoid of ideals, but they are real ideals, if you will pardon the bull.

I believe that I am in goodly company.  The library as I see it has also set its face toward the real.  What else is meant by our business branches, our technology rooms, our legislative and municipal reference departments?  They mean that slow as we may be to respond to community thought and to do our part in carrying on community education, we are vastly more sensitive than the school, which still turns up its nose at efforts like the Gary system; than the stage, which still teaches its actors to be stagy instead of natural; even than the producers of the very literature that we help to circulate, who rarely know how even to represent the conversation of two human beings as it really is.  And when a great new vehicle of popular artistic expression arises, like the moving picture, those who purvey it spend their millions to build mock cities instead of to reproduce the reality that it is their special privilege to be able to show.  And they hire stage actors to show off their staginess on the screen—­staginess that is a thousand times more stagy because its background is of waving foliage and glimmering water, instead of the painted canvas in front of which it belongs.  The heart of the community is right.  Its heroine is Mary Pickford.  It rises to realism as one man.  The little dog who cannot pose, and who pants and wags his tail on the screen as he would anywhere else, elicits thunderous applause.  The baby who puckers up its face and cries, oblivious of its environment, is always a favorite.  But the trend of all this, these institutions cannot see.  We librarians are seeing it a little more clearly.  We may see it—­we shall see it, more clearly still.

The self-education of a community often depends very closely on bonds of connection already established between the minds of that community’s individual members.  Sometimes it depends on a sudden connection made through the agency of a single event of overwhelming importance and interest.  Let me illustrate what I mean by connection of this kind.  For many years it was my duty to cross the Hudson river twice daily on a crowded ferry-boat, and it used to interest me to watch the behavior of the crowds under the influence