individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting
antagonism with each other.

The ideal of the average pedagogist is not a complete, well-rounded,
original being; rather does he seek that the result of his art of
pedagogy shall be automatons of flesh and blood, to best fit into the
treadmill of society and the emptiness and dulness of our lives. Every
home, school, college and university stands for dry, cold
utilitarianism, overflooding the brain of the pupil with a tremendous
amount of ideas, handed down from generations past. "Facts and data,"
as they are called, constitute a lot of information, well enough perhaps
to maintain every form of authority and to create much awe for the
importance of possession, but only a great handicap to a true
understanding of the human soul and its place in the world.

Truths dead and forgotten long ago, conceptions of the world and its
people, covered with mould, even during the times of our grandmothers,
are being hammered into the heads of our young generation. Eternal
change, thousandfold variations, continual innovation are the essence of
life. Professional pedagogy knows nothing of it, the systems of
education are being arranged into files, classified and numbered. They
lack the strong fertile seed which, falling on rich soil, enables them
to grow to great heights, they are worn and incapable of awakening
spontaneity of character. Instructors and teachers, with dead souls,
operate with dead values. Quantity is forced to take the place of
quality. The consequences thereof are inevitable.

In whatever direction one turns, eagerly searching for human beings who
do not measure ideas and emotions with the yardstick of expediency, one
is confronted with the products, the herdlike drilling instead of the
result of spontaneous and innate characteristics working themselves out
in freedom.

"No traces now I see
Whatever of a spirit's agency.
'Tis drilling, nothing more."

These words of Faust fit our methods of pedagogy perfectly. Take, for
instance, the way history is being taught in our schools. See how the
events of the world become like a cheap puppet show, where a few
wire-pullers are supposed to have directed the course of development of
the entire human race.

And the history of _our own_ nation! Was it not chosen by Providence to
become the leading nation on earth? And does it not tower mountain high
over other nations? Is it not the gem of the oce