Here is
work for the efficiency expert. When children are sitting at the table
of life, the home and the school in combination ought to be able to
discover what food they crave and not insist upon their eating olives
when they really crave oatmeal.
=The ideal of the school.=--We shall not have attained to right
conditions until such time as the stream of life that issues from the
school shall combine the agencies, in right proportions and relations,
that will conserve the best interests of society and administer its
activities with the maximum of efficiency. This is the ideal that the
school must hold up before itself as the determining plan in its every
movement. But this ideal presupposes no misfits in society. If there are
such, then it will decline in some degree from the plane of highest
efficiency. If there are some members of society who are straining at
the leash which Nature provided for them and are trying to do work for
which they have neither inclination nor aptitude, they cannot render the
best service, and society suffers in consequence.
=Misfits.=--The books teem with examples of people who are striving to
find themselves by finding their work. But nothing has been said of
society in this same strain. We have only to think of society as
composed of all the people to realize that only by finding its work can
society find itself. And so long as there is even one member of society
who has not found himself, so long must we look upon this one exception
as a discordant note in the general harmony.
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