ecomes one who has himself to be cared for. Here, too, the
ethical responsibility of the school on the social side must be
interpreted in the broadest and freest spirit; it is equivalent to that
training of the child which will give him such possession of himself
that he may take charge of himself; may not only adapt himself to the
changes that are going on, but have power to shape and direct them.

Apart from participation in social life, the school has no moral end nor
aim. As long as we confine ourselves to the school as an isolated
institution, we have no directing principles, because we have no object.
For example, the end of education is said to be the harmonious
development of all the powers of the individual. Here no reference to
social life or membership is apparent, and yet many think we have in it
an adequate and thoroughgoing definition of the goal of education. But
if this definition be taken independently of social relationship we have
no way of telling what is meant by any one of the terms employed. We do
not know what a power is; we do not know what development is; we do not
know what harmony is. A power is a power only with reference to the use
to which it is put, the function it has to serve. If we leave out the
uses supplied by social life we have nothing but the old "faculty
psychology" to tell what is meant by power and what the specific powers
are. The principle reduces itself to enumerating a lot of faculties like
perception, memory, reasoning, etc., and then stating that each one of
these powers needs to be developed.

Education then becomes a gymnastic exercise. Acute powers of observation
and memory might be developed by studying Chinese characters; acuteness
in reasoning might be got by discussing the scholastic subtleties of the
Middle Ages. The simple fact is that there is no isolated faculty of
observation, or memory, or reasoning any more than there is an original
faculty of blacksmithing, carpentering, or steam engineering. Faculties
mean simply that particular impulses and habits have been coordinated or
framed with reference to accomplishing certain definite kinds of work.
We need to know the social situations in which the individual will have
to use ability to observe, recollect, imagine, and reason, in order to
have any way of telling what a training of mental powers actually means.

What holds in the illustration of this particular definition of
education holds good from whatever po