So when the community educates itself, as it doubtless does and as it must do, it simply continues a process with which it has always been familiar, but without control, or under its own control.  Of all the things that we learn, control is the most vital.  What we are is the sum of those things that we do not repress.  We begin without self-repression and have to be controlled by others.  When we learn to exercise control ourselves, it is right that even our education should revert wholly to what it has long been in greater part—­a voluntary process.

This does not mean that at this time the pupil abandons guidance.  It means that he is free to choose his own guides and the place and method of using them.  Some rely wholly on experience; others are wise enough to see that life is too short and too narrow to acquire all that we need, and they set about to make use also of that acquired by others.  Some of these wiser ones use only their companions and acquaintances; others read books.  The wisest are opportunists; they make use of all these methods as they have occasion.  Their reading does not make them avoid the exchange of ideas by conversation, nor does the acquirement of ideas in either way preclude learning daily by experience, or make reflection useless or unnecessary.

He who lives a full life acquires ideas as he may, causes them to combine, change and generate in his own mind, and then translates them into action of some kind.  He who omits any of these things cannot be said to have really lived.  He cannot, it is true, fail to acquire ideas unless he is an idiot; but he may fail to acquire them broadly, and may even make the mistake of thinking that he can create them in his own mind.

He may, however, acquire fully and then merely store without change or combination; that is, he may turn his brain into a warehouse instead of using it as a factory.

And the man who has acquired broadly and worked over his raw material into a product of his own, may still stop there and never do anything.  Our whole organism is subsidiary to action and he who stops short of it has surely failed to live.

Our educative processes, so far, have dwelt heavily on acquirement, somewhat lightly on mental assimilation and digestion, and have left action almost untouched.  In these two latter respects, especially, is the community self-educated.

The fact that I am saying this here, and to you, is a sufficient guaranty that I am to lay some emphasis on the part played by books in these self-educative processes.  A book is at once a carrier and a tool; it transports the idea and plants it.  It is a carrier both in time and in space—­the idea that it implants may be a foreign idea, or an ancient idea, or both.  Either of its functions may for the moment be paramount; a book may bring to you ideas whose implantation your brain resists, or it may be used to implant ideas that are already present, as when an instructor uses his own text book.  Neither of these two cases represents education in the fullest sense.