EDUCATION : A SURVEY OF RECENT EDUCATIONAL THEORY. 163 



leisure well lie may nevertheless employ it badly — yet it will 

 probably come. But we have the proposal that the State should 

 discover the capacity of each young citizen and assign him his 

 job. The difficulty occuis that the capacity may be latent or 

 even non-existent ; that while one man reveals his bent in infancy 

 another manifests it fiist in middle life ; that capacity in some is 

 spasmodic, in others continuous; in some strictly limited, in 

 othei s diversified. It is satisfactory to know that steps have been 

 taken to deal with this difficulty. In the United States at any 

 rate a new profession, that of Vocational Counsellor, has sprung 

 up* ; when society faces the problem of the life-careers of its 

 youth, these experts will be able to put an end to the " vocational 

 anarchy which besets young workers.'' 



English writers usually assume that their readers find the 

 subject of education tedious, whereas American writers believe 

 that their public is keenly interested in it. For its readjust- 

 ment in our time some of the latter suggest three reasons. First, 

 never before was it as importa) t as it is row that each ir dividual 

 should he capable of sdf-respectirg, self-supportir g, h telhgert 

 work. Secondly, never before did the work of ohe ir dividual affect 

 the welfare of others on such a wide scale as at presert. In the 

 third place, ivdustrial methods ard processes depend to-day upon 

 knowledge of facts and laws of natural ar d social science in a much 

 greater degree than ever beforcf Some British writers speak in 

 a similar strain, f though more cautiously ; but the minds of 

 most of them are dominated by the war, and its causes or effects. 

 The notion that the Germans owed their initial successes to a 

 better educational system scarcely appears in the most recent 

 literature. Probably it has been silenced by Professor Burnet, 

 who has shown that the German system is not only anti-demo- 

 cratic, but is exposed to the chief criticisms which have been 

 launched against our own.§ At most there is evidence of a 

 hankering after the thoroughness of the Germans, accompanied 

 by the expression of a desire neither to adopt their aims nor 

 copy their methods. || And, indeed, statistics show that if the 

 prohibition of crime be a leading object of education, the German 



* M. Bloomfield, Youth, School and Vocation, p. 50. See also H. A, 

 Hollister, High School and Class Management, pp. 113-133. 

 t Schools of To-morrow, p. 310. 



X See A. Morgan, Education and Social Progress, p. 84. 



§ Higher Educa'ion and the War. 



II J. H. Badley, Education after the War, p. 6. 



M 2 



