schools are not doing their work properly. If the schools were not doing
their work properly, we should have direct statistical evidence of it, and
all the direct evidence I have seen goes to show that the schools are
accomplishing more to-day and accomplishing it by better methods, than
ever before.

Similarly, I believe that the totality of teaching ability in the
profession has increased. The conspicuous failures are persons who are
unfit to be teachers and who have been drafted into service because of our
sudden increase in educational plant. The result in some cases has been a
curious aberration in disciplinary methods--a freakishness that is
inseparable from any sudden advance such as we are making.

Our schools can and will advance much further in personnel, methods and
results; but they are by no means on the downward path now. One way in
which they may do better work is by greater appreciation of their
selective as well as their training function.

Suppose we have twenty bushels of raspberries and the same quantity of
potatoes to be prepared for food. Our present educational methods are a
good deal like those of a cook who should try to make the whole into
either jam or Saratoga chips, or should divide the lot in some arbitrary
way unrelated to their fitness for one or the other operation. We are
giving in our educational institutions many degrees and many kinds of
training without proper selection of the persons to whom the training is
to be applied. Selection must be and is made, of course, but it is made on
arbitrary lines, or for reasons unrelated to fitness. One boy's education
lasts ten years, and another's two, not because the former is fitted to
profit by a longer period of training, but because his father happens to
have money and inclination to give it to him. One young man studies