Education is one of the key words of our time. A man without an education, many of us believe, is an unfortunate victim of adverse 不利的，有害的circumstances deprived剥夺，使丧失 of one of the greatest twenties-century opportunities. Convinced of the importance of education , modern states “invest” in institutions of learning to get back “interest” in the form of a large group ofenlightened 启发，开导young men man woman who are potential leaders. Education, with its cycles of instruction so carefully worked out, punctuated by text-books—those purchasable wells of wisdom—what would civilization be like without its benefits?
So much is certain: that we would have doctors and preachers传道士, lawyers and defendants被告, marriages and birth—but our spiritual outlook would be different. We would lay less stress on “facts and figures” and more on the good memory, on applied psychology, and on the capacity of man to get along with his fellow-citizens. If our educational system were fashioned after its bookless past we would have the most democratic form of “college” imaginable. Among the people whom we like to call savages粗鲁的 all knowledge inherited by tradition is shared by all; it is taught to every member of the tribe部落，种族 so that in this respect everybody is equally equipped for life.
It is the ideal condition of the “equal start” which only our most progressive forms of modern education try to regain. In primitive cultures of obligation to seek and to receive the traditional instruction Is binding to all. There are no “illiterates”—if the term can be applied to peoples without a script—while our own compulsory 必须做的school attendance became law in Germany in 1642, in France in 1806, and in England in 1876, and is still non-existent in a number of civilized nations. This shows how long it was before we deemed认为视为 it necessary to make sure that all our children could share in the knowledge accumulated by the “happy few” during the past centuries.
Education in the wilderness is not a matter of monetary means. All are titled to an equal start. There is none of the hurry which, in our society , often hampers束缚，限制 the full development of growing personality . there , a child grows up under the ever-present attention of his parents; therefore the jungles and the savannahs know of no “juvenile 少年的delinquency.” No necessity of making a living away from home results in neglect of children, and no father Is confronted with his inability to “buy” an education for his child.