s to begin with. Education cannot,
therefore, be wholesale in its methods. It must be so adjusted
as to utilize and make the most of the multifarious
variety of native abilities and interests which individuals
display. If it does not utilize these, and instead sets up
arbitrary moulds to which individuals must conform, it will be
crushing and distorting the specific native activities which
are the only raw material it has to work upon.

There have not as yet been many detailed quantitative
studies of individual differences that would enable educators,
if they were free to do so, scientifically to adapt education to
specific needs and possibilities. Beginnings in this direction
are being made, though rather in advanced than in more
elementary education. Professional and trade schools, and
group-electives in college courses are attempts in this direction.
Any attempt, of course, to adapt education to specific
needs and interests, instead of crushing them into _a priori_
moulds, requires, of course, a wider social recognition and
support of education than is at present common. For individual
differences require attention. And where millions are
to be educated, individual attention requires an immense
investment in teaching personnel.

But in this utilization of original interests and capacities
lies the only possibility of genuinely effective education.[1]
In the first place to try in education to give individuals habits
for which they have no special innate tendencies to begin with,
is costly. Secondly, to train individuals for types of life or
work for which their gifts and desires are ill adapted is to
promote at once inefficiency and unhappiness. One reason
why the chance to identify one's life with one's work (as is the
case with the artist and the scholar) is so universally recognized
as good fortune, is because it is so rare. A general and
indiscriminate training of men, as if they were all fitted with
the same talents and the same longings, does as much as
underpayment or overwork to impair the quality of the work
done and the satisfaction derived from it.

[Footnote 1: A beginning in the application of this principle has
been made by the vocational guidance and employment management work
which is being done with increasing scientific accuracy throughout
the United States. Individual differences and interests are studied
with a view to putting "the right man in the right place." This
slogan is borrowed from