people, not even the Americans, is good enough to govern itself and to govern another people. The speeches of your orators, from Patrick Henry to Wendell Phillips, will be declaimed by Philippine schoolboys from Aparri to Zamboanga with all the fervor and conviction, with all the passionate reference to home and country, that made those eloquent Americans such irresistible champions of the rights of nations and of humanity.

In pleading the rights of your oppressed ancestors, Burke said in the House of Commons that the English people was the last people in the world to argue any other people into slavery. I say that the American people is the best people in the world to educate any other people up to independence. Our history, our politics, our books, nay we ourselves would have to be different were the result other than this. The kind of people we are, the way we govern ourselves, the history we have made, and the political philosophy we have given to the world, all consecrate us Americans as the advocates and preachers of liberty, democracy, and national independence. And I believe that an independent Philippine republic will be the final result, as it would be the most glorious consummation, of our great educational work in the Philippine islands.

HOW THE SCHOOL STRENGTHENS THE INDIVIDUALITY
OF THE PUPILS

W. T. HARRIS, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION,
WASHINGTON, D. C.

It is often said that a common-school system tends to cast all children in a common mold, and thus destroys or suppresses individuality. The common course of study, the three R's, geography, and history; the uniform disciplinary pressure insisting on regularity, punctuality, silence, and industry; the action and reaction of one pupil upon another; all these result in a self-adaptation of each pupil to the social standard of the school as a whole, and all these things are alleged to have only a leveling influence and to produce a common type of character, almost reminding one of the uniformity of product of the machinery of our manufacturing establishments.

This view has some plausibility, especially when one believes that the school produces a mechanical effect upon the child; but its plausibility grows less and less when we consider the actual relation of school industry to the production of individual power.

The good school will make its pupils alike in obedience to discipline and as to the possession of a knowledge of mathematics, geography, history, language, literature, etc., but this means that it will make its children alike in possessing the power of developing and expressing their individuality.

Take first the most mechanical side of school education, namely, its discipline. The pupils are required to be regular in attendance on the school sessions, and their coming and going is regulated by minute prescriptions as to time of entering and leaving, as to taking up each study, and attendance upon recitations or class exercises. This, in school parlance, is called punctuality. Regularity and punctuality secure rhythm of action, and each pupil, by the acquirement of these semi-mechanical habits, makes possible school instruction. He learns to combine with his fellows. Without regularity and punctuality one cannot have concert of action. The work of a social whole becomes impossible. The sort of individualism that is left after taking away social combination is such as belongs to the isolated man, and, on a large scale, it produces the most degraded specimens of humanity. The Robinson Crusoe who has to do everything for himself does nothing well. But when he associates with him Friday as a co-worker he becomes-not twice as powerful, but four times as powerful. Ten men combined are a hundred fold more powerful than ten men isolated one from another.

To give to each person in the social whole the net results of the experience of all his fellows is the object of education, and indeed it is the object of social life as a whole. Man is fitted by his faculties for this vicarious process of sharing the experience of others—he can live over in himself the lives of his fellowmen without having actually to make all the original experiments and suffer all the temporary defeats and disappointments incident to the career of first experience. But the errors and defeats of one person save his fellows from repeating precisely the same experiments. It happens that ninety-nine one-hundredths of one's doing and thinking in a well-educated community is guided by the prescriptions of educative agencies of some sort. There are educative influences, first, in the family; second, in the industrial community; third, in the political state; and fourth, in the church, taking the church in a broad sense as the collective instrumentalities that teach the accepted view of the world which is expressed in the prevailing civilization. The so-called uneducated person who has never been to school is all the more a person who follows the use and wont of his community—he has a little bundle of habits that he has learned in infancy from the family, and he follows them as if they were instincts or automatic impulses. He acts mostly from his spine or occiput-what are called the lower nerve centers—rather than with the cortex of his brain, which is used by the thoughtful person. The lowest savage has his traditions just as the highest representative of civilization has. His traditions enable him to follow the use and wont of the tribe to which he belongs. All of the tribal facilities combined do not suffice to give its individual members an ability to go outside of the narrow limits of the tribal territory and make business combinations with surrounding peoples nor to share with those peoples in their views of the

world, discussing with them their theories and thereby gaining more profound views. Each person in a community is continually making some observations upon nature or thinking out the causes and results of facts and events in his experience. To share in the aggregate results of the observations and reflections of one's tribe, one's nation, or of the world's civilization, is a very important privilege in any case, but the privilege varies in value enormously according to the scope of the participation involved. It is a good thing for the unlettered peasant to learn by hearsay from his fellows what they know by experience and what they have thought out. But it is incomparably more useful to be able, by means of books and the printed page, to have access to the observations of all men who have observed and reflected in all times and places. School education, as distinct from the education of the family, the state, the church, and the industrial community aims to give the means of access to the storehouse of observations and reflections of men in all ages and in all climes. This, I have already said, is a help to the development of individuality. It gives it the necessary means of expression. It stimulates the individual to travel out of the beaten paths of his neighborhood, to emulate the great men of the world and to climb the heights of achievement.

One may see what the school means in the development of individuality by going over the traditional course of study in our schools. This course of study excites our admiration because it has not been made by the wisdom of a few men getting together as a committee, but in its substantial outlines is a growth rather than a conscious product. The use of the written and the printed word is the first object of the school instruction, and it changes the child from ear-mindedness to eye-mindedness. Confined to the use of words known only by the ear, the individual has great difficulty in acquiring or understanding a technical vocabulary. The cultivated man, whether literary or scientific, thinks in the form of printed or written words, and accordingly thinks in accurate technical terms and has at his command fine shades of expression.

Stop and consider at this point whether the individuality of the child is not reinforced by the power to use these instruments of reading and writing. Without instruments he has a small scope of opportunity to act and to express his individuality. Armed with the arts of reading and writing, the opportunity of gaining facts and ideas from his fellow-men is increased indefinitely. He may manifest his individuality in a thousand new ways. By this process he will develop his individuality where otherwise it could not have been developed for the lack of the proper means. The experience of the illiterate is limited to what he can observe in himself and in a small circle of neighbors. But his school-educated companion, who can read and does read, is all the time widening his mental view by what he gets from the printed page. He is all the time growing and with increasing rate of progress in accuracy of thought, and at the

age of fifty years he is growing far more rapidly than at the age of forty. In fact, he continues to grow more rapidly at sixty and at three score and ten, if he reaches that age, than at any previous epoch. The illiterate, after leaving school, perhaps doubles his power just merely by oral intercommunication with his fellows in the course of thirty years of his life, but the average school-educated person, who can read and does read, grows at least ten times as much.

Who cares for the individuality of a person that cannot aid heroically in the conquest of nature or in creating social combinations and the development of institutions for the benefit of man. The individuality of the illiterate is mostly an unrealized possibility. The school helps the child to realize his individuality by getting hold of the instruments and appliances which form the right means for adding to his personal experience the vicarious experience of the race. Hence the school-educated is able to reinforce himself by the social whole.

The branches of study in the elementary schools include, not only reading and writing, but also arithmetic, geography, the grammar of one's native tongue, and the history of one's nation. Every one of these branches endows the pupil with some insight which gives him an increased ability to solve the practical questions of his daily life. Take arithmetic, for instance: the savage who cannot count beyond five or ten is limited and hampered in making combinations of things and forces. It is next to impossible to effect exchange of the most necessary articles without arithmetic and the merchant class of persons. This class becomes very numerous in the highest civilization. Its sole business it is to collect and distribute the productions of industry, and it can scarcely be said to exist in the tribe or in the illiterate orders of civilization. Karl Marx in his book on Capital, a book that forms the Bible of modern socialism, reduces the employments of mankind to two-(a) the production of commodities and (b) the exchange of them. He invents an algebraic formula to express this and to show the relations of labor to capital. C — M — C means the circulation of productions thru the aid of the market; C (or commodities) are sold and converted into M (or money), and then the money (M) buys commodities (C) again. The laborer has brought his productions to the world-market and exchanged them for what he needs of food or clothing, creature comfort or culture, and the circle is complete. Marx would minimize the usefulness of the middle term M (or money), which represents the class of men who are capitalists and merchants. Their formula is not C-M-C, but M-C-M, he tells us. They start with money (M), and with it buy commodities (C), but they buy only to sell again-they convert their commodities (C) into money (M), and aim to increase their capital by the exchange. M-C-M; money becomes more money by buying and selling commodities. But Marx does not seem to notice the importance of a world-market, or,

indeed, of a market of any kind. He supposes that that will come by nature, just as grass grows. But the fact is (and this is my reason for mentioning Marx in this paper) that the person who invents the machinery of exchange and the world-market is by far the greatest benefactor, because he takes things from the place where they are not wanted and carries them to the place where they are wanted-he converts mere things into wealth; he makes them property or capital. He unites widely sundered peoples by ties of mutual service. This gives us a glimpse of the way in which the school, with its three R's, performs its function of stimulating individuality-for the school-educated boy or girl sees more possibilities in each thing of nature than the illiterate sees. He has also acquired an appetite for social combinations and has obtained directive power to put together things into a machine and link man to man in a manufactory.

If one takes the view that the so-called middlemen, those who collect and distribute, are not producers in the sense that they add wealth to the community, he should revise his theory, considering that the surplus productions are worth little or nothing unless they are carried from the place where they are superfluous to the community that needs and wants them. The immense peach crop of New Jersey would be of very little value were it not for the markets of Philadelphia, New York, and the merchant class of the population, as well as the class engaged in transportation. The one billion of dollars annually earned by freight of goods in the United States adds just that amount to the value of the goods transported.

The study of geography in the elementary school substitutes for exaggerated, distorted, monstrous, superstitious notions a reasonably accurate view of the physical world as the habitat and working field of man. It contributes much to the ability of the child to read and understand the daily-printed information that comes before him regarding the noteworthy events of nations and peoples living on the face of the earth. What a lameness to the individuality—no matter how much gifted by birth but which labors under the disability of illiteracy-that has not learned anything of geography!

Think of grammar and its bringing to consciousness the parts of speech. This study develops the power of introspection more than any other subject. It enables one to analyze readily and accurately a complex statement or a complex nexus of conditions presented to him, and gives him a growing power to separate the essential from the unessential and to discriminate things and forces, and reach clearness thru a connected process.

Then the history of one's country, the story of the rise of its nationality, its collisions with other peoples, the heroic personages in its gallery of worthy men who have, by supreme self-sacrifice, earned the respect of