amount and kind of actual military training necessary to make this
physical equipment most effective. All this, plainly, must be provided
whether it be good or bad from a general educational standpoint. But
preparedness and national defense mean, of course, more than the
possession of guns and more than military training as such. And there
can be no hard and fast line between military preparedness and the
wider technical preparedness in which all the equipment and skill of
scientific and mechanical activities of the country are always ready
to be mobilized in the defense of it; or between these and the still
more general preparedness through the organization and control of the
human factor in ways that are not specifically military or
mechanically technical at all.

If preparation for defense is by no means exhausted by military
training, on the other hand not all military training is intended for
defense. Decision about the actual amount and kind of military
training, we say, may be left to the expert, but it is for the
psychologist and the educator to decide whether we need a mere minimum
of such training or a general military training for educational
purposes. After all, however, this is perhaps more a matter of taste
in educational practices than of learning. There is plenty of opinion
at least on both sides. Some maintain that military discipline is of
very great benefit to the man and to society. From the German point of
view it is the equivalent of hygiene for the individual. It is a
national regimen for physical and mental health. It is also the symbol
and the expression of social solidarity. Many believe that the
discipline of soldiering would be especially good for all American
boys. But there is no dearth of evidence on the other side--that
military training in so far as it is really conducted in the military
manner is brutalizing.

After all, we say this may be a matter of preference. Some like
military discipline in the schools and everywhere; some do not. The
present writer for one will confess that he does not. It is not the
danger of making a people warlike that one sees in it, so much as the
certainty of introducing into all the daily life a spirit that is
inconsistent with our stage of civilization and with the most
wholesome spirit of education. It savors of the unprogressive. It
means, in our opinion, the introduction into the school, in a far too
easy and simple way, and consequently at far too