concept of life. The artisan who defines life in terms of his own trade
is impatient with much that the school is trying to do. He would have
the scope of the school narrowed to his concept of life. If art and
literature are beyond the limits of his concept, he can see no warrant
for their presence in the school. The work of the schools cannot be
standardized until life itself is standardized, and that is neither
possible nor desirable. The glory of life is that it does not have
fixity, that it is ever crescent.

=Teaching defined.=--Teaching school may be defined, therefore, as the
process of interpreting life by the laboratory method. The teacher's
work is to open the gates of life for the pupils. But, before these
gates can be opened, the teacher must know what and where they are. This
view of the teacher's work is neither fanciful nor fantastic; quite the
contrary. Life is the common heritage of people young and old, and the
school should be so organized and administered as to teach people how to
use this heritage to the best advantage both for themselves and for
others. If a child should be absent from school altogether, or if he
should be incarcerated in prison from his sixth to his eighteenth year,
he would still have life. But, if he is in school during those twelve
years, he is supposed to have life that is of better quality and more
abundant. Life is not measured by years, but by its own intensity and
scope. It has often been said that some people have more life in
threescore and ten years than Methuselah had in his more than nine
hundred years.

=Life measured by intensity.=--This statement is not demonstrable, of
course, but it serves to make evident the fact that some people have
more of life in a given time than others in the same time. In this
sense, life may be measured by the number of reactions to objectives.