He builds up, from birth onwards, his own mental mechanisms, and forms more of them, that is to say, is more " educable," and takes longer in doing so, that is to say, in growing up and maturing his experience, than any other animal.
This factor is the Record of the Past, which grows and develops by laws other than those affecting the perishable bodies of successive generations of mankind, and exerts an incomparable influence upon the educable brain, so that man, by the interaction of the Record and his educability, is removed to a large extent from the status of the organic world and placed in a new and unique position, subject to new laws and new methods of development unlike those by which the rest of the living world is governed.
Education is not in its essential nature a training administered to the young by an older generation, but is the natural and unaided assimilation of the Record of the Past by the automatically educable brain - an assimilation which is always in all races very large but becomes far larger in civilized communities.
The later stages of evolution leading from his ape-like ancestors to man have consisted definitely in the acquirement of a larger and therefore more educable brain by man and in the consequent education of that brain.