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