“Reform means a militant minority, or, to follow Trotter, a small Herd.  This little Herd would give council, relief, and recuperation to its members.  The members of the Herd will be under merciless fire from the convention-ridden members of general society.  They will be branded outlaws, radicals, agnostics, impossible, crazy.  They will be lucky to be out of jail most of the time.  They will work by trial and study, gaining wisdom by their errors, as Sidney Webb and the Fabians did.  In the end, after a long time, parts of the social sham will collapse, as it did in England, and small promises will become milestones of progress.

“From where, then, can we gain recruits for this minority?  Two real sources seem in existence—­the universities and the field of mental-disease speculation and hospital experiment.  The one, the universities, with rare if wonderful exceptions, are fairly hopeless; the other is not only rich in promise, but few realize how full in performance.  Most of the literature which is gripping that great intellectual no-man’s land of the silent readers, is basing its appeal, and its story, on the rather uncolored and bald facts which come from Freud, Trotter, Robinson, Dewey, E.B.  Holt, Lippmann, Morton Prince, Pierce, Bailey, Jung, Hart, Overstreet, Thorndike, Campbell, Meyer and Watson, Stanley Hall, Adler, White.  It is from this field of comparative or abnormal psychology that the challenge to industrialism and the programme of change will come.

“But suppose you ask me to be concrete and give an idea of such a programme.

“Take simply the beginning of life, take childhood, for that is where the human material is least protected, most plastic, and where most injury to-day is done.  In the way of general suggestion, I would say, exclude children from formal disciplinary life, such as that of all industry and most schools, up to the age of eighteen.  After excluding them, what shall we do with them?  Ask John Dewey, I suggest, or read his ‘Schools of To-morrow,’ or ‘Democracy and Education.’  It means tremendous, unprecedented money expense to ensure an active trial and error-learning activity; a chance naturally to recapitulate the racial trial and error-learning experience; a study and preparation of those periods of life in which fall the ripening of the relatively late maturing instincts; a general realizing that wisdom can come only from experience, and not from the Book.  It means psychologically calculated childhood opportunity, in which the now stifled instincts of leadership, workmanship, hero-worship, hunting, migration, meditation, sex, could grow and take their foundation place in the psychic equipment of a biologically promising human being.  To illustrate in trivialities, no father, with knowledge of the meaning of the universal bent towards workmanship, would give his son a puzzle if he knew of the Mecano or Erector toys, and no father would give the Mecano if he had grasped the educational potentiality of the gift to his child of $10 worth of lumber and a set of good carpenter’s tools.  There is now enough loose wisdom around devoted to childhood, its needed liberties and experiences, both to give the children of this civilization their first evolutionary chance, and to send most teachers back to the farm.