Many people impelled by these ideas have become impatient with the slow recognition on the part of the educators of their manifest obligation to prepare and nourish the child and the citizen for social relations.  The educators should certainly conserve the learning and training necessary for the successful individual and family life, but should add to that a preparation for the enlarged social efforts which our increasing democracy requires.  The democratic ideal demands of the school that it shall give the child’s own experience a social value; that it shall teach him to direct his own activities and adjust them to those of other people.  We are not willing that thousands of industrial workers shall put all of their activity and toil into services from which the community as a whole reaps the benefit, while their mental conceptions and code of morals are narrow and untouched by any uplift which the consciousness of social value might give them.

We are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading and writing, suspecting them to rest upon the assumption that the ordinary experience of life is worth little, and that all knowledge and interest must be brought to the children through the medium of books.  Such an assumption fails to give the child any clew to the life about him, or any power to usefully or intelligently connect himself with it.  This may be illustrated by observations made in a large Italian colony situated in Chicago, the children from which are, for the most part, sent to the public schools.

The members of the Italian colony are largely from South Italy,—­Calabrian and Sicilian peasants, or Neapolitans from the workingmen’s quarters of that city.  They have come to America with the distinct aim of earning money, and finding more room for the energies of themselves and their children.  In almost all cases they mean to go back again, simply because their imaginations cannot picture a continuous life away from the old surroundings.  Their experiences in Italy have been those of simple outdoor activity, and their ideas have come directly to them from their struggle with Nature,—­such a hand-to-hand struggle as takes place when each man gets his living largely through his own cultivation of the soil, or with tools simply fashioned by his own hands.  The women, as in all primitive life, have had more diversified activities than the men.  They have cooked, spun, and knitted, in addition to their almost equal work in the fields.  Very few of the peasant men or women can either read or write.  They are devoted to their children, strong in their family feeling, even to remote relationships, and clannish in their community life.