res a somewhat
new and practically revolutionary organisation in education. It will be
an organisation which takes for its basic principle something like this:

_Viz._: The very essence of an average pupil is that he needs to be
studied more, not less, than any one else in order to find his
master-key, the master-passion to open his soul with. The essence of a
genius is that almost any one of a dozen passions can be made the motive
power of his learning. His soul is opening somewhere all the time.

The less individuality a student has, the more he is like other
students, the more he should be kept away from other students until what
little individuality he has has been brought out. It is not only equally
true of the ordinary man as well as of the man of genius that he must
educate himself, but it is more true. Other people's knowledge can be
poured into and poured over a genius innocently enough. It rolls off him
like water on a duck's back. Even if it gets in, he organically protects
himself. The genius of the ordinary man needs special protection made
for it. As our educational institutions are arranged at present, the
more commonplace our students are the more we herd them together to make
them more commonplace. That is, we do not believe in them enough. We
believe that they are commonplace through and through, and that nothing
can be done about it. We admit, after a little intellectual struggle,
that a genius (who is bound to be an individual anyway) should be
treated as one, but a common boy, whose individuality can only be
brought out by his being very vigorously and constantly reminded of it,
and exercised in it, is dropped altogether as an individual, is put into
a herd of other common boys, and his last remaining chance of being
anybody is irrevocably cut off. We do not believe in him as an
individual. He is a fraction of a roomful. He is a 67th or 734th of
something. Some one has said that the problem of education is getting to
be, How can we give, in our huge learning-machines, our exceptional
students more of a chance? I state a greater problem: How can we give
our common students a chance to be exceptional ones?

The problem can only be solved by teachers who believe something, who
believe that there is some common ground, some spiritual law of
junction, between the man of genius, the natural or free man, and the
cramped, _i. e._, artificial, ordinary one. It would be hard to name any
more important propo