=The ideal of the school.=--We shall not have attained to right
conditions until such time as the stream of life that issues from the
school shall combine the agencies, in right proportions and relations,
that will conserve the best interests of society and administer its
activities with the maximum of efficiency. This is the ideal that the
school must hold up before itself as the determining plan in its every
movement. But this ideal presupposes no misfits in society. If there are
such, then it will decline in some degree from the plane of highest
efficiency. If there are some members of society who are straining at
the leash which Nature provided for them and are trying to do work for
which they have neither inclination nor aptitude, they cannot render the
best service, and society suffers in consequence.

=Misfits.=--The books teem with examples of people who are striving to
find themselves by finding their work. But nothing has been said of
society in this same strain. We have only to think of society as
composed of all the people to realize that only by finding its work can
society find itself. And so long as there is even one member of society
who has not found himself, so long must we look upon this one exception
as a discordant note in the general harmony. If one man is working at
the forge who by nature is fitted for a place at the desk, then neither
this man nor society is at its best. And a large measure of the
responsibility for such discord and misfits in society must be laid at
the door of the school because of its inability to discover native
tendencies.

=Common interests.=--There are many interests that all children have in
common when they enter the school in the morning, and these interests
may well become the starting points in the day's work. The conversations
at breakfast tables and the morning paper beget and stimulate many of
these interests and the school does violence to the children, the
community, and itself if it attempts to taboo these interests. Its work
is to rectify and not to suppress. When the children return to their
homes in the evening they should have clearer and larger conceptions of
the things that animated them in the morning. If they come into the
school all aglow with interest in the great snowstorm of the night
before, the teacher does well to hold the lesson in decimals in abeyance
until she has led around to the subject by means of readings or stories
that have to do with