Wise educators find that a combined system of organized games in which the social instinct can be expressed and developed, and of independent constructive work, in which the creative impulse can find satisfaction, best meets the corporate and creative needs of adolescence, favours the right development of character, and produces a harmonized life.  On the level of the spiritual life too this principle is valid; and, guided by it, we should seek to give young people both corporate and personal work and experience.  On the one hand, gregariousness is at its strongest in the healthy adolescent, the force of public opinion is more intensely felt than at any other time of life, that priceless quality the spirit of comradeship is most easily educed.  We must therefore seek to give the spiritual life a vigorous corporate character; to make it “good form” for the school, and to use the team-spirit in the choir and the guild as well as in the cricket field.  By an extension of this principle and under the influence of a suitable teacher, the school-mob may be transformed into a co-operative society animated by one joyous and unselfish spirit:  all the great powers of social suggestion being freely used for the highest ends.  Thus we may introduce the pupil, at his most plastic age, into a spiritual-social order and let him grow within it, developing those qualities and skills on which it makes demands.  The religious exercises, whatever they are, should be in common, in order to develop the mass consciousness of the school and weld it into a real group.  Music, songs, processions, etc., produce a feeling of unity, and encourage spiritual contagion.  Services of an appropriate kind, if there be a chapel, or the opening of school with prayer and a hymn (which ought always to be followed by a short silence) provide a natural expression for corporate religious feeling:  and remember that to give a feeling opportunity of voluntary expression is commonly to educe and affirm it.  As regards active work, whilst school charities are an obvious field in which unselfish energies may be spent, many other openings will be found by enthusiastic teachers, and by the pupils whom their enthusiasm has inspired.

On the other hand, the spare-time occupations of the adolescent; the independent and self-chosen work, often most arduous and always absorbing, of making, planning, learning about things—­and most of us can still remember how desperately important these seemed to us, whether our taste was for making engines, writing poetry, or collecting moths—­these are of the greatest importance for his development.  They give him something really his own, exercise his powers, train his attention, feed his creative instinct.  They counteract those mechanical and conventional reactions to the world, which are induced by the merely traditional type of education, either of manners or of mind.  And here, in the prudent encouragement of a personal interest in and dealing with the actual problems of conduct and even of belief—­the most difficult of the educator’s tasks—­we guard against the merely acquiescent attitude of much adult piety, and foster from the beginning a vigorous personal interest, a first-hand contact with higher realities.