SCHOOL ORGANIZATION AND INSTRUCTION 123 



people, the student bodies in the universities represent perhaps the 

 most powerful hostile influences with which despotism must contend. 



This shows the power of student life when it organizes itself under 

 the whip of a great, purpose, and it mercilessly exposes the enormous 

 moral loss to society and the delinquencies of an educational theory 

 which permits any diversion of these forces of youth from the work 

 of upbuilding the social and national life. 



The economic vandalism of our time can be charged to no one per- 

 son or thing; but responsibility for it may be laid directly at the door 

 of a school system which permits this social deterioration to begin in 

 the earliest years and thence onward to increase in a steady ratio 

 throughout the higher institutions of learning. 



All schools, however, have always had some social life of a more 

 or less organized character. In the plays and games outside of school 

 hours; in the stolen whispers of the study and recitation periods; in 

 the clandestine schemes laid for the discomfiture of the teacher; in 

 the literary societies, and in many other ways, through the exercise 

 of their social instincts, the pupils have managed to make their school 

 days tolerable for themselves and, to a like extent, often intolerable for 

 the teacher. But these aspects of school life have been, and still are, 

 considered as diversions, as incidents and somewhat as detriments to 

 what is called, in school parlance, the ' regular work.' It is largely due 

 to this fact that in most schools the socializing process as yet remains 

 inchoate. 



There is a misconception, almost universal, concerning the organiz- 

 ing center of the school as a social body. Eecognizing that in the 

 past the chief organizing influence has come through the exercise of the 

 play instinct, the unguarded inference is that it is now proposed to 

 socialize the school through play alone; or, what comes to the same 

 thing, by the introduction of work which shall be turned into play ! 

 It is through this perverted idea that the New Education stands charged 

 with triviality in its methods and with a disregard for that robust 

 discipline which comes through sturdy and purposeful work. Nothing 

 could be farther from the truth. Students in the philosophy of edu- 

 cation are slowly coming to understand that the spelling-book, as such; 

 that the endless repetitions which usually accompany ' formal number ' ; 

 that the struggle with words merely for the sake of a vocabulary in 

 reading; that the wrestle with technical grammar as an introduction 

 to the study of language — that all these and other subjects of like kind, 

 as they generally appear in the schools, are essentially unsocial in their 

 influence. Such students believe that herein lies a great obstacle to that 

 reform which seeks to socialize the schools. If, however, this so-called 

 work is to be removed from its present dominating position in the 

 curriculum, it is as yet inconceivable to most people how there can be 



