--The One Object of Educational Activity

Perhaps our language was not as temperate as it should have been, but we
told that father something which we would fain repeat until every
educator and every parent in the United States has heard it and written
it on the tables of his heart,--

THE ONE OBJECT OF EDUCATION IS TO ASSIST AND PREPARE
CHILDREN TO LIVE.

Why have we established a billion-dollar school system in the United
States? Is it to pay teachers' salaries, to build new school houses, and
to print text-books by the million? Hardly. These things are incidents
of school business, but they are no more reason for the school's
existence than fertilizer and seed are reasons for making a garden.
Gardens are cultivated in order to secure plants and flowers; the school
organization of which Americans so often boast exists to educate
children.

"Of course," you exclaim, "we knew that before." Did you? Then why was
my friend forced to choose between the wreck of his daughter's health
and the disarrangement of a bit of school machinery? Why is Dr.
Chancellor able to describe a situation existing "generally and
characteristically," in which the welfare of children is bartered away
for high promotion averages? The truth is that society still tolerates,
and often accepts, the belief that the purpose of education is the
formation of a school system. We have yet to learn that, to use Herbert
Spencer's phrase, the object of education is the preparation of
children for complete living.

Education exists for the purpose of preparing and assisting children to
live. To do that work effectively, it must devote only so much effort to
school administration and to school machinery as will perform for boys
and girls that very effective service.

No two children are alike, and no two children have exactly similar
needs. There are, however, certain kinds of needs which all children
have in common. It is obviously impossible to discuss in the abstract
the needs of any individual child. It is just as obviously possible to
analyze child needs, and to classify them in workable groups. It is true
that all children are different; so are all roses different, yet all
have petals and thorns in common. Similarly, there are certain needs
which are common to all children who play, who grow, who live among
their fellows, and who expect to do something in life. The matter may be
stated more concretely thus,--

I. The s