ain recruits for this minority? Two real
sources seem in existence--the universities and the field of
mental-disease speculation and hospital experiment. The one, the
universities, with rare if wonderful exceptions, are fairly hopeless;
the other is not only rich in promise, but few realize how full in
performance. Most of the literature which is gripping that great
intellectual no-man's land of the silent readers, is basing its appeal,
and its story, on the rather uncolored and bald facts which come from
Freud, Trotter, Robinson, Dewey, E.B. Holt, Lippmann, Morton Prince,
Pierce, Bailey, Jung, Hart, Overstreet, Thorndike, Campbell, Meyer and
Watson, Stanley Hall, Adler, White. It is from this field of comparative
or abnormal psychology that the challenge to industrialism and the
programme of change will come.

"But suppose you ask me to be concrete and give an idea of such a
programme.

"Take simply the beginning of life, take childhood, for that is where
the human material is least protected, most plastic, and where most
injury to-day is done. In the way of general suggestion, I would say,
exclude children from formal disciplinary life, such as that of all
industry and most schools, up to the age of eighteen. After excluding
them, what shall we do with them? Ask John Dewey, I suggest, or read
his 'Schools of To-morrow,' or 'Democracy and Education.' It means
tremendous, unprecedented money expense to ensure an active trial and
error-learning activity; a chance naturally to recapitulate the racial
trial and error-learning experience; a study and preparation of those
periods of life in which fall the ripening of the relatively late
maturing instincts; a general realizing that wisdom can come only from
experience, and not from the Book. It means psychologically calculated
childhood opportunity, in which the now stifled instincts of leadership,
workmanship, hero-worship, hunting, migration, meditation, sex, could
grow and take their foundation place in the psychic equipment of a
biologically promising human being. To illustrate in trivialities, no
father, with knowledge of the meaning of the universal bent towards
workmanship, would give his son a puzzle if he knew of the Mecano or
Erector toys, and no father would give the Mecano if he had grasped the
educational potentiality of the gift to his child of $10 worth of lumber
and a set of good carpenter's tools. There is now enough loose wisdom
around devoted to childhood