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I take up now the prophetic teachings of Emerson with regard to education.  In the first place, he saw, with a clearness to which very few people have yet attained, the fundamental necessity of the school as the best civilizing agency, next to steady labor, and the only sure means of permanent and progressive reform.  He says outright:  “We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education.  What we call our root-and-branch reforms, of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms.  We must begin higher up—­namely, in education.”  He taught that if we hope to reform mankind, we must begin not with adults, but with children:  we must begin in the school.  There are some signs that this doctrine has now at last entered the minds of the so-called practical men.  The Cubans are to be raised in the scale of civilization and public happiness; so both they and we think they must have more and better schools.  The Filipinos, too, are to be developed after the American fashion; so we send them a thousand teachers of English.  The Southern states are to be rescued from the persistent poison of slavery; and, after forty years of failure with political methods, we at last accept Emerson’s doctrine, and say:  We must begin earlier,—­at school.  The city slums are to be redeemed; and the scientific charity workers find the best way is to get the children into kindergartens and manual training schools.

Since the Civil War, a whole generation of educational administrators has been steadily at work developing what is called the elective system in the institutions of education which deal with the ages above twelve.  It has been a slow, step-by-step process, carried on against much active opposition and more sluggish obstruction.  The system is a method of educational organization which recognizes the immense expansion of knowledge during the nineteenth century, and takes account of the needs and capacities of the individual child and youth.  Now, Emerson laid down in plain terms the fundamental doctrines on which this elective system rests.  He taught that the one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil, dissipation.  He said:  “You must elect your work:  you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest.”  To this exhortation he added the educational reason for it,—­only by concentration can the youth arrive at the stage of doing something with his knowledge, or get beyond the stage of absorbing, and arrive at the capacity for producing.  As Emerson puts it, “Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing.”  The educational institutions of to-day have not yet fully appreciated this all-important step from knowing to doing.  They are only beginning to perceive that, all along the course of education, the child and the youth should be doing something as well as learning something; should be stimulated and trained by achievement; should be constantly encouraged