were demanded of conscious creative effort, _more power
on the part of all our educational factors_. The school appears now to
be at the parting of the ways, we say, when it must either settle down
to its routine and limited occupation of preparing children for life,
or become a far greater power in the world than it has as yet been. We
must decide whether the school is to control, or to be controlled by,
the political and industrial forces of the day. We must see whether
the school is going to reflect the culture and the moods of the
environment, or whether the school shall exert a creative influence
upon its surroundings.

It is plain that nothing less than a radical change in the school can
now greatly alter its position, and release it from its bondage to
politics and from the overwhelming influences of its environment, and
prevent the leveling downward and the stereotyping process that is
taking place in the school, both as regards its intellectual and moral
product and the training and selection of teachers. Nothing less than
a movement which shall break up some of the deepest and most firmly
rooted habits and conventions of the school and throw the school back,
so to speak, upon more generic and primitive motives than those that
now control it will be sufficient. _The school needs more than
anything else a change of scene_--a change of _venue_, if a legal term
be allowed. The school everywhere, but especially the school of the
city, is surrounded by influences that prejudice it to fixed habits of
thought and keep it true to a type which has long since ceased to be
necessary. The school is causing an in-breeding of the city spirit in
all the great industrial countries.

No single change in any institution, in our view, could strike closer
to the roots of our whole educational problem of the future than the
bodily transfer of the city school far out into the open country. Such
a move seems wholly practicable, economic from every point of view,
even the financial, and it would place the school in a position in
which profound changes in its whole plan and organization could hardly
fail to follow almost automatically. With our present facilities for
transportation, the daily exodus of children from the surroundings in
which are being produced the elements of our civilization that are
hardest to control would be entirely possible. The effects upon the
whole of education, and upon all the future life of countries like