=Native dispositions.=—­Society needs only a limited number of chemists and only such as have the native tendencies that will make chemistry most effective in the activities of society.  But we have been proceeding upon the agreeable assumption that every pupil has such native tendencies.  Such an assumption absolves the school, of course, from the necessity of discovering what pupils are susceptible to chemistry and of devising ways and means of making this important discovery.  Because we do not know how to make this discovery we find solace in the assumption that it cannot or need not be made.  We then proceed to apply the Procrustean bed principle with the very acme of sang froid.  Here is work for the efficiency expert.  When children are sitting at the table of life, the home and the school in combination ought to be able to discover what food they crave and not insist upon their eating olives when they really crave oatmeal.

=The ideal of the school.=—­We shall not have attained to right conditions until such time as the stream of life that issues from the school shall combine the agencies, in right proportions and relations, that will conserve the best interests of society and administer its activities with the maximum of efficiency.  This is the ideal that the school must hold up before itself as the determining plan in its every movement.  But this ideal presupposes no misfits in society.  If there are such, then it will decline in some degree from the plane of highest efficiency.  If there are some members of society who are straining at the leash which Nature provided for them and are trying to do work for which they have neither inclination nor aptitude, they cannot render the best service, and society suffers in consequence.

=Misfits.=—­The books teem with examples of people who are striving to find themselves by finding their work.  But nothing has been said of society in this same strain.  We have only to think of society as composed of all the people to realize that only by finding its work can society find itself.  And so long as there is even one member of society who has not found himself, so long must we look upon this one exception as a discordant note in the general harmony.  If one man is working at the forge who by nature is fitted for a place at the desk, then neither this man nor society is at its best.  And a large measure of the responsibility for such discord and misfits in society must be laid at the door of the school because of its inability to discover native tendencies.

=Common interests.=—­There are many interests that all children have in common when they enter the school in the morning, and these interests may well become the starting points in the day’s work.  The conversations at breakfast tables and the morning paper beget and stimulate many of these interests and the school does violence to the children, the community, and itself if it attempts to taboo these interests.  Its work is to rectify and not to