THE AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL 305 



solidarity, makes children feel themselves to be social units, favors the 

 impulse to activity arising from mere mass, is vital to the state. The 

 marching together, singing together, playing together (provided the 

 play be judiciously organized) is a splendid stimulus to social and 

 civic life, impossible to be done away with. Along with this, however, 

 and all the more strongly because of this, the individuality of the child 

 must be nourished, promoted and developed by every rational means. 

 Within the range of his powers all health, virtue and capacity are within 

 him as the germ is within the seed. The teacher's business is to stimu- 

 late, to encourage and also to prune, these elemental forces. This can 

 not be done by instruction given by wholesale, but only through 

 genuine education acting directly upon the individual child. 



Shall teachers, then, be converted into nursery governesses, one to 

 each pupil? That extreme would be worse than the other. Under a 

 right plan of public education, however, no teacher would have charge 

 of more than twenty pupils ; and no teacher would have charge of any 

 at all unless, by temperament, by understanding of child nature, by a 

 thorough professional training, he or she were fitted to make out of 

 every one of those twenty pupils the most that can be made. Such 

 professionally trained teachers, with classes limited to a proper size, 

 would not simply instruct, they would really educate their pupils by 

 giving them the tools of knowledge, not as dead processes, but as living 

 means to illimitable ends. Out of the common, elementary studies, 

 with no loss but with great gain in form, they would develop the con- 

 tent of literature, of power of expression, of sober reasoning, of world 

 interest, of nature interest, of social and civic responsibility; and. upon 

 these fundamental studies they would lay the solid foundations of self- 

 reliance, self-knowledge, self-respect. They would do this, moreover, 

 not through dependence upon text-books, routine, and uniform lessons; 

 nor, on the other hand, would they do it by excursions into psychological 

 subtleties or by pandering to their pupils' and their own self-conscious- 

 ness. They would do it as every intelligent, human man or woman who 

 has the " faculty " of teaching and who has been taught to teach, knows 

 how to appeal to the differing nature of each child, making him see the 

 common fact from his special point of view and assimilate it to his 

 personality, thereby building up by sure degrees his individual char- 

 acter. 



Such teaching — and this is no vision; it has been demonstrated 

 again and again — would make most children eager to go to school, im- 

 patient to learn, greedy of every new chance of mental and moral 

 growth. Out of such an atmosphere would come a race of artisans and 

 business men — better still, of citizens — such as the world has not yet 

 seen. It would be a really efficient race of ivorl-ing men, neither wasting 

 time and materials, nor shirking what they have to do ; for they would 



VOL. LXXIV. — 21. 



