r social system to believe that a ladder should only be
used in one direction--and that the direction which tends to remove men
from contact and sympathy with their fellows. But in truth we need to
discard the metaphor of the ladder altogether, with its implied
suggestion that some tasks of community-service are more honourable and
involve more of what the world calls 'success' than others. We do not
desire a system of education which picks out for promotion minds gifted
with certain kinds of capacity and stimulates them with the offer of
material rewards, while the so-called humdrum remainder are left, with
their latent talents undiscovered and undeveloped.

Recent educational experiments,[74] and not least that most testing of
all school examinations, the war, have shown us that we must revise all
our old notions as to cleverness and stupidity. We know now that, short
of real mental deficiency, there is or ought to be no such personage as
the dunce. Just as the criminal is generally a man of unusual energy and
mental power directed into wrong channels, so the dunce is a pupil whose
special powers and aptitudes have not revealed themselves in the routine
of school life. And just as the criminal points to serious defects in
our social system, so the dunce points to serious defects in our
educational system. The striking record of our industrial schools and
reformatories in the war shows what young criminals and dunces can do
when they are given a fair field for their special gifts. One of the
chief lessons to be drawn from the war is the need for a new spirit and
outlook in our national education from the elementary school to the
University. We need a system which treats every child, rich or poor, as
a living and developing personality, which enables every English boy and
girl to stay at school at least up to the time when his or her natural
bent begins to disclose itself, which provides for all classes of the
community skilled guidance in the choice of employment based upon
psychological study of individual gifts and aptitude,[75] which sets up
methods of training and apprenticeship in the different trades--or, as I
would prefer to call them the different professions--such as to
counteract the deadening influence of premature specialization, and
which ensures good conditions and a sense of self-respect and
community-service to all in their self-chosen line of life, whether
their bent be manual or mechanical or commercia