d be to
make it universal. For a somewhat different purpose, I said; I should
perhaps have said for an added purpose, because I would have the three
ends of the elementary school kept constantly in view as fundamental
bases. But, assuming that these things have been well done, the chief
purpose of the high school should be to discover the child's latent
powers, his dominant interests, and then, so far as these are wholesome,
help him plan his education in their general direction. I might put it
briefly thus: the chief function of the high school should be to help
the child to become acquainted with himself and begin the planning of
his future. Let us look at it carefully and see if it is not sound.

At the conclusion of the elementary school, at the age of 14, the boys
and girls are still children; they are developing, not developed, in
either body or mind. They have not yet reached, in the main, the period
of rapid acceleration of physical growth, intellectual expansion, or
moral development; they are just reaching it; they are now in the early
stages of that wonderful period of adolescence when the boy is being
transformed into the man and the girl into the woman. They are neither
children nor adults, yet manifesting the characteristics of both. They
do not know themselves, nor does any one else know them intimately. How
can they? They are not yet formed. They are in the process of formation.
What will emerge as a result of the process, we know only in broad
outlines--not at all in minute detail. So many factors are at work and
there are possible so many combinations of factors that no one can tell;
for it is during the period of adolescence that hereditary
characteristics show themselves. Up to this time the child is a child of
the race; during this period it becomes the offspring of its parents.
And the factors of heredity--father, mother, ancestry--are mingling and
clashing and combining with the factors of environment, and what the
outcome is going to be, nobody knows, in specific cases, in advance.

This is the period when the heart, the lungs, and the brain are being
transformed, modified, whipt into shape for the performance of the
duties of adulthood. It is a period when, in the intellectual realm,
because of what is taking place in the physical, concepts are being
clarified, relationships traced, ideas formed, things seen in the right
perspective, and real reasoning begun. It is the period when, in the
moral