s on the one hand, and
from the schools of art, music, and of technology on the other There
was no cohesion, no concerted effort, no mutual support, no great plan
of advance, no homologating idea.

This fact in itself is sufficient to account for the ineffectiveness,
the despondencies, the insincerities and ceaseless unrest of Western
civilisation in the nineteenth century. The tree of human life cannot
flower and bear fruit for the healing of the nations when its great
life-forces spend themselves in making war on each other.

If the experience of the century which lies before us is to be
different, it must be made so by means of education. Education is the
science which deals with the world as it is capable of becoming. Other
sciences deal with things as they are, and formulate the laws which
they find to prevail in things as they are. The eyes of education are
fixed always upon the future, and philosophy of whatever kind,
directly adumbrates a Utopia, thinks on educational lines.

The aim of education must therefore be as wide as it is high, it must
be co-extensive with life. The advance must be along the whole front,
not on a small sector only. William Morris, when he tried his hand at
painting, used to say, that what bothered him always was the frame: he
could not conceive of art as something "framed off" and isolated from
life. Just as William Morris wanted to turn all life into art, so with
education. It cannot be "framed off" and detached from the larger
aspects of political and social well-being; it takes all life for its
province. It is not an end in itself, any more than the individuals
with whom it deals; it acts upon the individual, but through the
individual it acts upon the mass, and its aim is nothing less than the
right ordering of human society.

To cope with a task which can be stated in these terms, education must
be free. A new age postulates a new education. The traditions which
have dominated hitherto must one by one be challenged to render
account of themselves, that which is good in them must be conserved
and assimilated, that which is effete must be scrapped and rejected.
Neither can the administrative machinery, as it exists, be taken for
granted; unless it shows those powers of adaptation and growth which
show it to be alive and not dead, it too must be scrapped and
rejected; new wine is fatal to old skins. Education must regain once
more what she possessed at the time of the Renascence--