e must also test our school work by finding whether it affords
the conditions necessary for the formation of good judgment. Judgment as
the sense of relative values involves ability to select, to
discriminate. Acquiring information can never develop the power of
judgment. Development of judgment is in spite of, not because of,
methods of instruction that emphasize simple learning. The test comes
only when the information acquired has to be put to use. Will it do what
we expect of it? I have heard an educator of large experience say that
in her judgment the greatest defect of instruction to-day, on the
intellectual side, is found in the fact that children leave school
without a mental perspective. Facts seem to them all of the same
importance. There is no foreground or background. There is no
instinctive habit of sorting out facts upon a scale of worth and of
grading them.

The child cannot get power of judgment excepting as he is continually
exercised in forming and testing judgments. He must have an opportunity
to select for himself, and to attempt to put his selections into
execution, that he may submit them to the final test, that of action.
Only thus can he learn to discriminate that which promises success from
that which promises failure; only thus can he form the habit of relating
his purposes and notions to the conditions that determine their value.
Does the school, as a system, afford at present sufficient opportunity
for this sort of experimentation? Except so far as the emphasis of the
school work is upon intelligent doing, upon active investigation, it
does not furnish the conditions necessary for that exercise of judgment
which is an integral factor in good character.

(_c_) I shall be brief with respect to the other point, the need of
susceptibility and responsiveness. The informally social side of
education, the aesthetic environment and influences, are all-important.
In so far as the work is laid out in regular and formulated ways, so far
as there are lacking opportunities for casual and free social
intercourse between pupils and between the pupils and the teacher, this
side of the child's nature is either starved, or else left to find
haphazard expression along more or less secret channels. When the school
system, under plea of the practical (meaning by the practical the
narrowly utilitarian), confines the child to the three R's and the
formal studies connected with them, shuts him out from the vital in