of education certain experiences, and the
power of applying them, have been acquired by each individual, so that
by this means he is enabled to perform some particular social service
for the community of a directly or indirectly economic nature. For if,
as the result of the educative process, we establish systems of means
for the realisation of ends which have no social value, then so far we
have failed to make the individual socially efficient. "The youth we
would train has little time to spare; he owes but the first fifteen or
sixteen years of his life to his tutor, the remainder is due to action.
Let us employ this short time in necessary instruction. Away with your
crabbed, logical subtleties; they are abuses, things by which our lives
can never be made better."[8] In these words Montaigne writes against
the false ideal that the mere accumulation of knowledge apart from any
purpose it may serve in enabling us better to understand either the
world of nature or of history should be the aim of education, and
throughout all education we must ever keep in mind that knowledge
acquired must be capable of being used and applied for the realisation
of some social purpose, otherwise it is so much useless lumber, to the
individual a burden, soon dropped, to society valueless, since it can
maintain and further no real interest of the community.

But to be socially efficient implies not merely that the individual
should be fitted to perform some service economically useful to the
community, it further implies that as the result of the process of
education there should have been acquired certain capacities of action
which restrain him from unduly interfering with the freedom of others.
He must acquire certain experiences which restrain him from hindering
the full and free development of others; he must be trained to use his
freedom rightly, to acquire those capacities for action which fit him to
take his place in the moral cosmos of his time and generation. Further,
as Mr. Bagley also points out, to be socially efficient implies in
addition that the individual should contribute something further to the
advancement of the civilisation into which he is born, and thus pass on
to his successors an increasing heritage.

The threefold aim of all education, then, is to secure the physical, the
economic, and the ethical efficiency of the future members of the
community; and our educational agencies must throughout keep this
threefold as