tive force of progress,
as it has always been; but because every human being is a creative agent
and a possible generator of fine enthusiasm, we are sceptical of the
moral idealism of the few and demand the education of the many, that
there may be greater freedom, strength, and subtilty of intercourse and
hence an increase of dynamic power. We are not content to include all
men in our hopes, but have become conscious that all men are hoping and
are part of the same movement of which we are a part.

Many people impelled by these ideas have become impatient with the slow
recognition on the part of the educators of their manifest obligation
to prepare and nourish the child and the citizen for social relations.
The educators should certainly conserve the learning and training
necessary for the successful individual and family life, but should add
to that a preparation for the enlarged social efforts which our
increasing democracy requires. The democratic ideal demands of the
school that it shall give the child's own experience a social value;
that it shall teach him to direct his own activities and adjust them to
those of other people. We are not willing that thousands of industrial
workers shall put all of their activity and toil into services from
which the community as a whole reaps the benefit, while their mental
conceptions and code of morals are narrow and untouched by any uplift
which the consciousness of social value might give them.

We are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading and
writing, suspecting them to rest upon the assumption that the ordinary
experience of life is worth little, and that all knowledge and interest
must be brought to the children through the medium of books. Such an
assumption fails to give the child any clew to the life about him, or
any power to usefully or intelligently connect himself with it. This may
be illustrated by observations made in a large Italian colony situated
in Chicago, the children from which are, for the most part, sent to the
public schools.

The members of the Italian colony are largely from South
Italy,--Calabrian and Sicilian peasants, or Neapolitans from the
workingmen's quarters of that city. They have come to America with the
distinct aim of earning money, and finding more room for the energies of
themselves and their children. In almost all cases they mean to go back
again, simply because their imaginations cannot picture a continuous
life