Abraham Kaplan has produced the clearest philosophical insights in all of library literature into the real nature of library education by providing an outsider's view of librarianship that (1) explains the "mess" librarians are in; (2) identifies humanism as the firm foundation of their profession; and (3) correlates librarianship with the metasciences. In "The Age of the Symbol--A Philosophy of Library Education," Kaplan has shown that the major problems of librarianship are problems of symbolism, communication, and the intellectual disciplines. These problems go unresolved, however, because librarians continue to confuse symbols with symbolic referents, scientific with humanistic approaches to communication, and empirical with intellectual disciplines. The result is a crippling paradox in which the librarians, who ought to be leading in librarianship, want to be followers, and the information scientists, who should be following, want to be leading. This paradox can only be resolved by a truly comprehensive theory of communications that integrates the realities at both ends of a wire connecting human beings to their physical and cultural environments, a theory that explains all of their complex interactions with both of those environments. (LMM)