the Three R’s as the sole “essentials” appear to be calling from out the rather distant past.  Many things have since become essential; and other things are being added year by year.  The normal method of education in things not yet put into the schools, is participation in those things.  One gets his ideas from watching others and then learns to do by doing.  There is no reason to believe that as the school lends its help to some of the more difficult things, this normal plan of learning can be set aside and another substituted.  Of course the schools must take in hand the difficult portions of the process.  Where complicated knowledge is needed, the schools must teach that knowledge.  Where drill is required, they must give the drill.  But the knowledge and the drill should be given in their relation to the human activities in which they are used.  As the school helps young people to take on the nature of adulthood, it will still do so by helping them to enter adequately into the activities of adulthood.  Youth will learn to think, to judge, and to do, by thinking, judging, and doing.  They will acquire a sense of responsibility by bearing responsibility.  They will take on serious forms of thought by doing the serious things which require serious thought.

It cannot be urged that young people have a life of their own which is to be lived only for youth’s sake and without reference to the adult world about them.  As a matter of fact children and youth are a part of the total community of which the mature adults are the natural and responsible leaders.  At an early age they begin to perform adult activities, to take on adult points of view, to bear adult responsibilities.  Naturally it is done in ways appropriate to their natures.  At first it is imitative play, constructive play, etc.—­nature’s method of bringing children to observe the serious world about them, and to gird themselves for entering into it.  The next stage, if normal opportunities are provided, is playful participation in the activities of their elders.  This changes gradually into serious participation as they grow older, becoming at the end of the process responsible adult action.  It is not possible to determine the educational materials and processes at any stage of growth without looking at the same time to that entire world of which youth forms a part, and in which the nature and abilities of their elders point the goal of their training.

The social point of view herein expressed is sometimes characterized as being utilitarian.  It may be so; but not in any narrow or undesirable sense.  It demands that training be as wide as life itself.  It looks to human activities of every type:  religious activities; civic activities; the duties of one’s calling; one’s family duties; one’s recreations; one’s reading and meditation; and the rest of the things that are done by the complete man or woman.

READING AND LITERATURE