rity workers find the best way is to get the children into
kindergartens and manual training schools.

Since the Civil War, a whole generation of educational administrators
has been steadily at work developing what is called the elective system
in the institutions of education which deal with the ages above twelve.
It has been a slow, step-by-step process, carried on against much active
opposition and more sluggish obstruction. The system is a method of
educational organization which recognizes the immense expansion of
knowledge during the nineteenth century, and takes account of the needs
and capacities of the individual child and youth. Now, Emerson laid down
in plain terms the fundamental doctrines on which this elective system
rests. He taught that the one prudence in life is concentration; the one
evil, dissipation. He said: "You must elect your work: you shall take
what your brain can, and drop all the rest." To this exhortation he
added the educational reason for it,--only by concentration can the
youth arrive at the stage of doing something with his knowledge, or get
beyond the stage of absorbing, and arrive at the capacity for producing.
As Emerson puts it, "Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate
which can make the step from knowing to doing." The educational
institutions of to-day have not yet fully appreciated this all-important
step from knowing to doing. They are only beginning to perceive that,
all along the course of education, the child and the youth should be
doing something as well as learning something; should be stimulated and
trained by achievement; should be constantly encouraged to take the step
beyond seeing and memorizing to doing,--the step, as Emerson says, "out
of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness." Emerson carried this
doctrine right on into mature life. He taught that nature arms each man
with some faculty, large or small, which enables him to do easily some
feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society;
and that this faculty should determine the man's career. The advocates
of the elective system have insisted that its results were advantageous
for society as a whole, as well as for the individual. Emerson put this
argument in a nutshell at least fifty years ago: "Society can never
prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he
was created to do."

Education used to be given almost exclusively through books. In recent