单选题
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 circumstances deprived of one of the greatest twentieth-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
of enlightened young men and women who are potential leaders. Education, with
its cycles of instruction so carefully worked out, is punctuated by
textbooks--those purchasable wells of wisdom--what would civilization be like
without its benefits? So much is certain: that we would have
doctors and preachers, lawyers and defendants, marriages and births; but our
spiritual outlook would be different. We would lay less stress on "facts and
figures" and more on a good memory, on applied psychology, and on the capacity
of a 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 all
knowledge inherited by tradition is shared by all; it is taught to every member
of the tribe 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 modem education try to regain. In primitive
cultures the obligation to seek and to receive the traditional instruction is
binding to all. There are no "illiterates"--if the term can be applied to people
without a script--while our own compulsory school attendance became law in
Germany in 1642, in France in 1806, and in England 1876, and is still
non-existent in a number of "civilized" nations. This shows how long it was
before we deemed 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 entitled to an equal start. There is none of the hurry
which, in our society, often hampers the full development of a growing
personality. There, a child grows up under the ever-present attention of his
parents, therefore the jungles and the grasslands know of no "juvenile
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.
单选题
The word "interest" in the first paragraph most probably means ______.