next lesson to the person who masters the principle at once. Reviews are automatically provided by being embodied in subsequent lessons.

The results. "We are astonished at our immediate results, in changed spirit, in reawakened young ambitions and energy, in rapidity of pupils' progress, and in our own enthusiasm," writes Dr. Burk. The individual classroom is a workshop where each student is busy with his own work. It is the function of the teacher to learn what each

can do and the motives which prompt his doing. She is there to help him to his work, and to give him the encouragement of approval and assistance when he needs it. Going from desk to desk to help pupils who perhaps did not need it, these teachers soon found to be debilitating to their scholars, for "substantial learning" can be secured only by the pupil "putting his own mind through the given process." The familiar recitation is completely abandoned, but when, by individual doing of work, a group of pupils have familiarized themselves with an epoch of history, a geographical area, some problem of industry, or other unit of study in a given field, the classroom becomes a forum in which they are brought together for a

Socratic discussion," for the mutual clarifying of their ideas upon it. Such deliberations have a regular place in the weekly program.

An effort is now being made to work out a course of study to cover eight years, the allotment of work in each year to be determined by what the slowest pupils can reasonably accomplish in that time. Since each one advances as rapidly as he can, the others will complete the work in a shorter period. No one is demoted, or turned back to repeat a grade. Promotion by a card is a merely nominal recognition of what has been accomplished. The school day is divided into short work periods, and each child's work is regulated in such a way as to vary his activities according to his need. Home study is entirely abolished. From twenty-five to thirty per cent of the pupils are advancing much more rapidly than the usual class rate. From ten to twenty per cent are going more slowly than under the class system, but they are doing thorough work, and not giving an appearance of keeping up only.

This plan differs from earlier forms of individual instruction in that it abolishes the individual recitation of a memorized lesson. A teacher guides the work of as many pupils as under the class system. The correction of written work is the real difficulty. But the pupils do that, for "the principle is sound that, as a means of learning in most subjects, there is no exercise quite so productive and thorough as the correction of errors."

CHAPTER XI

LEARNING TO WORK WITH CONCEPTS

The essential thing in education. As long as schools exist the most important thing about them will be not their budget, nor their buildings, nor their administration, nor their teachers, nor their examinations, nor even the branches of learning which make up their course of study; the most important thing about them will be what their students do. These other things are necessary that the work of schools may go on, but they are only means to that end, that end, their work, being a doing on the part of their students, a doing of such a kind that the students will have to go on repeating it as long as they live, a doing therefore which the experimenting of the ages has found to be necessary and which their fellow men in days to come will require from them. But these other things. -the money needed for the maintenance of the schools, the buildings needed to house them, the corporation or the board of education, the president of the college, the master or superintendent of schools, the professors or the teachers who "give the instruction," and, most of all, perhaps, the subjects

which they study - keep getting in the way of the students' work and arrogating to themselves by turns a kind of monopoly of attention which keeps the nature of the educational undertaking sadly obscured. However, experienced teachers of teachers are not at all uncertain as to the relative importance of these elements in the educational process. When they send their apprentices to visit the workshops of other teachers they charge them above everything to watch what the students are doing, and after that to give attention to what the teacher is doing to facilitate the students' work. When they inspect schools themselves they keep their eyes upon that aspect of them. For what the learner does is the essential thing.

What should the student do? To find out what the learner should do one must hunt down the meaning of a good many very familiar words — words whose meaning their very familiarity has tended to confuse and obscure. Concerning them one must ask himself the Socratic questions: What is education? What is knowledge? What is mind? What is truth? What is science? What is literature? What is culture? What is a vocation? What is personality? etc. In short, he must criticize the concepts of education. The human endeavor which goes at matters in that way is called philosophy. It forces one to trace the connections and relations

of things which the sciences take for granted and study separately. One who studies chemistry is not required to study the philosophy of chemistry, and one who studies physics or biology may neglect to criticize the assumptions of these sciences, but one who studies education must not neglect to work out his own philosophy of education in the light of what men have already thought about its meaning and its purposes, for education is an integrating process, and to make wholes or personalities it must proceed from the knowledge of the whole. All real philosophy has education for its object, and all real education must ground itself in philosophy.

A superseded theory of education. There was a theory of mind which maintained that human experience was built up by impressions. David Hume was its prophet. "An impression first strikes upon the senses and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. . . . To give a child an idea of scarlet or orange, of sweet or bitter, I present the objects, or in other words convey to him. these impressions; but proceed not so absurdly, as to endeavor to produce the impressions by exciting the ideas.... This priority of the impressions is an equal proof that our impressions are the cause of