Excerpt from A Student's Textbook in the History of Education: From the standpoint of history, education is the means by which nations have attempted to realize their social and spiritual ideals. Every nation that has faith in its ideals wishes to have them transmitted for the benefit of its own posterity, and its system of education is the instrument by which it tries to do this. Because these ideals have been different in the several nations their systems of education have differed. And because the ideals of the same nation undergo change its system of education will change