the death of the soul. Prussia has
shown how the psychology of the crowd can be skilfully manipulated for
the most sinister ends. It is a happy omen for our democracy that both
these complementary movements are combined in the new life of the
schools. To both appeals, the appeal of personal freedom, and the
appeal of the corporate life, the British child is peculiarly
responsive. Round these two health-centres the form of the new system
will take shape and grow.

And growth it must be, not building. The body is not built up on the
skeleton, the skeleton is secreted by the growing body. The hope of
education is in the living principle of hope and enthusiasm, which
stretches out towards perfection. One distrusts instinctively at the
present time anything schematic. There are men, able enough as
organisers, who will be ready to sit down and produce at two days'
notice a full cut-and-dried scheme of educational reconstruction. They
will take our present resources, and make the best of them, no doubt,
re-arranging and re-manipulating them, and making them go as far as
they can. They will shape the whole thing out in wood, and the result
will be wooden. It will be static and stratified, with no upward lift.
But that is not the way. Education is a thing of the spirit, it is
instinct with life, [Greek: thermon ti pragma] as Aristotle would
say, drawing upon resources that are not its own, "unseen yet crescive
in its faculty" and in its growth taking to itself such outward form
as it needs for the purpose of its inward life. Six years at least it
will take for the new spirit to work itself out into the definite
larger forms.

That does not mean that it will come without hard purposeful thinking
and much patient effort. Education does not "happen" any more than
"art happens,"--and just as with the arts of the middle ages, so the
well-being of education depends not on the chance appearance of a few
men of genius but on the right training and love of the ordinary
workman for his work. Education is a spiritual endeavour, and it will
come, as the things of the spirit come, through patience in
well-doing, through concentration of purpose on the highest, through
drawing continually on the inexhaustible resources of the spiritual
world. The supreme "maker" is the poet, the man of vision. For the
administrator, the task is different from what it has been. It is for
him to watch and help experiments, to prevent the abuse of freedom,
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