imit. We force the children to
travel our standard pedagogical tracks and strive to fashion and fix them
in our standard pedagogical molds. And woe betide the pupil who jumps the
track or shows an inclination to travel a route not of the teacher's
choosing! He is haled into court forthwith and enjoined to render a strict
accounting for his misdoing; for anything that is either less or more than
a strict conformity to type is accounted a defection. We demand absolute
obedience to the oracular edicts of the school as a passport to favor.
Conformity spells salvation for the child and, in the interests of peace,
he yields, albeit grudgingly, to the inevitable.

In world affairs we deem initiative a real asset, but one of the saddest
of our mistakes in ordering school activities consists in our fervid
attempts to prove that the school is detached from life and something
quite apart from the world. We would have our pupils believe that, when
they are in school, they are neither in nor of the world. At our
commencement exercises we tell the graduates that they are now passing
across a threshold out into the world; that they are now entering into the
realms of real life; and that on the morrow they will experience the
initial impact of practical life. These time-worn expressions pass
current, at face value, among enthusiastic relatives and friends, but
there are those in the audience who know them to be the veriest cant, with
no basis either in logic or in common sense. It is nothing short of
foolishness to assert that a young person must attain the age of eighteen
years before he enters real life. The child knows that his home is a part
of the world and an element in life, that the grocery is another part, the
post-office still another part, and so on through an almost endless list.
Equally well does he know that the school is a part of life, because it
enters into his daily experiences the same as the grocery and the
post-office. Full well does he know that he is not outside of life when he
is in school, and no amount of sophistry can convince him otherwise. If
the school is not an integral part of the world and of life, so much the
worse for the school and, by the same token, so much the worse for the
teacher. Either the school is a part of the world or else it is neither a
real nor a worthy school.

The hours which the child spends in school are quite as much a part of his
life as any other portion of the day, no matter wha