ds of history, the school tended to be an
authoritative institution with more or less rigid methods of
procedure. With fixed ideas of truth and the means of acquiring
truth, it was to a considerable degree unbending in its attitude
toward youth. Even if freedom from economic toil and social
regulation permitted, only the type of mind that could fit the
school's established institutional ways could endure its discipline
and achieve its rewards. Other types of mentality it would not
receive or retain as students. Under such an organization the
school was selective of a special kind of talent. It was not an
instrument, so adjustable in its methods of appeal and instruction,
that every manner of child could gain considerable of the wisdom of
the world. But when a more democratic order was established, the
function of the school underwent a considerable change. Democracy
granted to all men freedom in manhood; to safeguard its privileges,
it had to educate all men in childhood. The school for selected
scholars had to be transformed into a school for every variety of
citizen. With every child sent to school by order of the state,
the teacher had to forego his traditional aloofness, and to adjust
his methods of teaching so that every member of the enlarged school
community could come into a knowledge of the civilization in which
he lived. With the inclusion of the blind, the deaf, the slow of
mind, and the restless of spirit,--individuals left out of the old
scheme of education and now reverently educated by the new
democratic order in spite of all their defects,--the school becomes
more flexible and variable in its methods of transmitting truth.
More of the knowledge of human life is brought within the
comprehension of children; more men are brought into a large and
sympathetic participation in the activities of our civilization.
In the truest sense the school becomes an instrument of adjustment
between childhood and society.

_Evolutionary thought interprets childhood_

If the democratic movement emphasized the factor of social
adjustment in the school's function, it was the scientific movement
of the last half-century which drew attention to infancy as a
superior opportunity for biological adjustment Among all the
contributions of modern evolutionary science to educational
thought, none is, more striking or more far-reaching in its
implications than that special group of generalizations which
states the bio