obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be brought into
conformity with external standards. Since conformity is the aim, what is
distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or regarded
as a source of mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made equivalent to
uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in the
novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown.
Since the end of growth is outside of and beyond the process of growing,
external agents have to be resorted to to induce movement toward it.
Whenever a method of education is stigmatized as mechanical, we may be
sure that external pressure is brought to bear to reach an external end.

2. Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save
more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save
more education. It is a commonplace to say that education should not
cease when one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is that the
purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by
organizing the powers that insure growth. The inclination to learn from
life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn
in the process of living is the finest product of schooling.

When we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of fixed
comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to give up
thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits. Abandoning this
notion, we are also forced to surrender our habit of thinking of
instruction as a method of supplying this lack by pouring knowledge into
a mental and moral hole which awaits filling. Since life means growth,
a living creature lives as truly and positively at one stage as at
another, with the same intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims.
Hence education means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which
insure growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age. We first look
with impatience upon immaturity, regarding it as something to be got
over as rapidly as possible. Then the adult formed by such educative
methods looks back with impatient regret upon childhood and youth as a
scene of lost opportunities and wasted powers. This ironical situation
will endure till it is recognized that living has its own intrinsic
quality and that the business of education is with that quality.
Realization that life is growth protects us from that so-called
idealizing of childhoo