Education is specifically a human activity. Our minds are like handles to which alternative systems of culture can be fitted. So far, in most human societies, education, in the broad sense of teh transmission of a cultural heritage, has been an unself-conscious activity. People have mostly acquired their ancestral culture in the way they learn their mother tongue. This unsophisticated kind of education continues to play an important part even in societies in process of civilisation in which organised and formal systems of education have come to be estimated. Even in educational institutions in which the official staple is book-learning the forming of habits and training of character are still largely left to be taken care of by the spontaneous effects of social relations. What the child brings with him from his home may count for as much as what is deliberately impressed upon at school. The importance of the home's contribution comes to light when an educational institution that has been the preserve of some privileged minority is thrown open to a wider public. It takes more than one generation for a family that has made its way out of a less privileged into a more privileged social class to acquire the full cultural heritage of the class to which it has won admission. A society enters on the process of civilisation as soon as it can afford to maintain a minority, however small, whose time and energy is not wholly taken up in producing food and other primary necessities of life. This leisured minority is the social mileau in which an organised life and unself-conscious apprenticeship in the older generation way of life comes to be supplemented, more and more, by the organised and self-conscious instructions which is what we mean today in our society when we use the word 'education'. But every good thing has its price, and the introduction of formal education has several awkward consequences. One consequence is to make education become a burden on the mind. In the act of making it formal we make it cumulative. How is a limited human mind to cope with cultural heritage of successive generations that is perpetually increasing in bulk? The problem is aggravated when people begin deliberately extending the range of human knowledge by systematic research. Any attempt at simplification of the content will result in improvement. Another consequence of formalising education is to make it esoteric. When poetry, sacred or secular, is preserved over a series of generations by being committed to memory or to writing, the work of art 'freezes' the language in which it is conveyed.