What should true education do? When most people think of the word "education," they think of a pupil as a sort of sausage container. Into this empty container, the teachers are supposed to stuff "education." But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousands years ago, is not inserting the stuffing of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing out of what is in the mind. "The most important part of education," once wrote William Ernest Hocking, the distinguished Harvard philosopher, "is this instruction of a man in what he has inside of him." And, as Edith Hamilton has reminded us, Socrates never said, "I know, learn from me." He said, rather, "Look into your own selves and find the spark of truth that God has put into every heart and that only you can develop to fame." In the dialogue called the "Meno," Socrates takes an ignorant slave boy, without a day of schooling, and proves to the amazed observers that the boy really "knows" geometry ----because the principles of geometry are already in his mind, waiting to be called out. So many of the discussions and controversies about the content of education are useless and inconclusive because they are concerned with what should "go into" the student rather than with what should be taken out, and how this can best be done. The college student who once said to me, after a lecture, "I spend so much time studying that I don&39;thave a chance to learn anything," was expressing his dissatisfaction with the sausage-container view of education. He was being so stuffed with varied facts, with such an indigestible mass of material, that he had no time (and was given no encouragement) to draw on his own resources, to use his own mind for analyzingand synthesizing and evaluating this material. Education, to have any meaning beyond the purpose of creating well-informed dunces, must elicit from the pupil what is potential in every human being ----the rules of reason, the inner knowledge of what is proper for men to be and do, the ability to assess evidence and come to conclusions that can generally be agreed on by all open minds and warm hearts. Pupils are more like oysters (牡蛎) than sausages. The job of teaching is not to stuff them and then seal them up, but to help them open and reveal the riches within. There are pearls in each of us, if only we knew how to develop them with enthusiasm and insistence. What did Socrates say about genuine education?