The education of the best thinkers should be an education for initiative and originality. Effective originality depends, first of all, upon sound and exhaustive knowledge of what the course of preceding events has been. To take their unique places in civilized society, it would seem, therefore, that the intellectually gifted need especially to know what the evolution of culture has been. And since at eight or nine years of age they are not as yet ready for specialization, what they need to know is the evolution of culture as it has affected _common things_. At present, this is not taught to children or to adolescents, except in fragmentary and casual ways. Persons typically graduate from elementary school, high school, and college, and take postgraduate degrees without learning much, if anything, about the evolution of lighting, of refrigeration, of shipping, of clothing, of etiquette, of trains, of libraries, and of a thousand things which have been contributed to the common life by persons in past times and which distinguish the life of civilized man from the existence of the savage. These things are vaguely taken for granted even by the intelligent, educated person. No systematic knowledge of how they came into being enriches his understanding. Nor is he aware of the biographies of those who have made his comfort and his safety possible. No more does he understand how dangerous and destructive forces came to be in the world. Of these vast fields the college graduate is typically ignorant, as has frequently been proved. The activities which make up the life of a civilized man may be variously organized and classified for purposes of study in the elementary school. A number of the progressive schools have undertaken projects in these fields. The pupils in such schools usually test at a median of about 118 IQ, and the work they have done, while it is helpful and suggestive, is not what is needed for pupils of the caliber with which we are here dealing. Topical classifications which have suggested themselves as areas for study might be stated as follows: food; shelter; clothing; transportation; sanitation and health; trade; time-keeping; illumination; tools and implements; communication; law; government; education; warfare; punishment; labor; recreation. Every one of these areas of human culture affords the opportunity and necessity for studying _the evolution of common things_, satisfying the intellectual curiosity, and challenging the power of learning of the children here considered. ENRICHMENT UNITS AT SPEYER SCHOOL