readily guessed at than measured. Under
these circumstances, the attempt to prepare studies for an "average
child" is manifestly futile. The course may be organized, but it will
hardly meet the needs of large numbers of the individual children who
take it.

VI Shall Child or Subject Matter Come First?

The old education presupposed an average child, and then prepared a
course of study which would fit his needs. The new education recognizes
the absurdity of averaging unlike quantities, and accepts the ultimate
truth that each child is an individual, differing in needs, capacity,
outlook, energy, and enthusiasm from every other child. An arithmetic
average can be struck, but when it is applied to children it is a
hypothetical and not a real quantity. There is not, and never will be,
an average child; hence, a school system planned to meet the needs of
the average child fits the needs of no child at all.

Mathematics may be taught to the average child. So may history and
geography. While subject matter comes first in the minds of educators, a
course of study designed to meet average conditions is a possibility.
The moment, however, that the schools cease to teach subjects and begin
to teach boys and girls, such a proceeding is out of the question.

The temptation in a complex school system, where children are grouped by
hundreds and thousands, to allow the detail of administration to overtop
the functions of education is often irresistible. The teacher with
forty pupils learns to look upon her pupils as units. The superintendent
and principals, seeking ardently for an overburdened commercial ideal
named "efficiency," sacrifice everything else to the perfection of the
mechanism. Among the smooth clicking cogs, child individuality has only
the barest chance for survival.

VII The Vicious Practices of One "Good" School

There are school systems in which organization has overgrown child
welfare, in which pedagogy has usurped the place of teaching. In such
systems the teacher teaches the prescribed course of study, whether or
no. The officers of administration, aiming at some mechanical ideal,
shape the schools to meet the requirements of system.

The proneness of some teachers and school administrators alike to
overemphasize mechanics, and to underemphasize the welfare of individual
children is well illustrated in a recent statement by Dr. W. E.
Chancellor, who, in writing of a first-hand investigation made in a cit