_the development of an inner life_. That is what Rousseau wanted
to bring about and Pestalozzi and Froebel, and our own Colonel Parker of
more recent times, the modern apostle of childhood, had the same vision.
And so to Froebel and these others, likewise, the school was an
institution in which each child should discover his own individuality,
work out his own personality, and develop harmoniously all his powers.
True, in that environment and doing all that, the child is going to
learn the relationships of society, and thus the school might become a
means for social progress as well as the instrument of individual
development. But this was incidental. The development of the inner life
was the goal. Fashioned in the quiet, in the study, away from the haunts
of man, this became the program and the rallying cry, and out on the
firing line it was striven for. On the educational battlefields of both
Europe and America, where redoubts were being stormed and advance
positions taken, this was the one great end in view. It eventuated in
the child study movement of the present generation that is now at its
height and that has done so much to mitigate the severities of the old
time school room practises and likewise greatly aided in putting
education on a scientific basis.

The immediate followers, I say, of the great European quartet of
educators had the above worthy goal in view; but with their followers,
many of them, especially the noisy ones, the modern sophists, it
degenerated into a theory of pure individualism of the most selfish
type. The theory of getting on in the world, every man for himself,
became rampant. The school came to be looked upon as an institution in
which children could learn how to get ahead of the rest of the
community, and education as merely another weapon to use in making
society contribute more to purse and pleasure. And on the firing line,
formed by these noisy agitators, mistaken by many as educational
leaders, these were the things striven for. But this aberration was only
temporary. The real educational leaders, in trying to realize the goal
of Rousseau and Pestalozzi and to do it having to combat this movement
of wildcat educational speculation, gradually came to see a more
important truth even than the one they were seeking. As on many another
firing line, victories by the wayside have clarified our vision and
given us new perspectives, and a goal, not at first recognized, looms
large upon the