Inasmuch as the colleges and the secondary schools are both uncertain as regards the meaning and aim of general education, it is not surprising to find the grade schools also at sea, their pupils the victims both of meaningless tradition and reckless experiment. The tradition of our grade schools, educational experts tell us, was brought by Horace Mann from Prussia. There the _Volkschule_ was designed for the children of the people, who should be trained with a view to remaining in the station in which they had been born. At least, it may be conceded, the German designers of the system had a purpose in mind, and knew the means to attain it; but both purpose and means are strangely at variance with American conditions and ideals. Other experts have pointed out the extraordinary retarding of the educational process after the first years, when the child learns by a natural objective method some of the most difficult processes of physical life, accomplishing extraordinary feats of understanding and control; and some of the most hopeful experiments in primary education look toward continuing this natural method for a longer time. At present the principle of regimentation seems to be the most important one in the grade school, and as the pace is necessarily that of the slowest, the pupils in general have a large amount of slack rope which it is the problem of principals and teachers to draw in and coil up. Altogether the grade school represents a degree of waste and misdirection which would in itself account for the tendencies toward mental caprice or stagnation which are evident in the pupils who proceed from it. Thus the parallel which Professor Wendell established between our educational system and the mediæval church would seem to have a certain foundation. In the colleges, as in the monasteries, we have a group of ascetic specialists, sustained in their labours by an apocalyptic vision of a world which they can set on fire, and in which no flesh can live; and a mass of idle, pleasure-loving youth of both sexes, except where some Abbot Samson arises, with strong-arm methods momentarily to reduce them to order and industry. In the high schools, as in the cathedrals, we have great congregations inspired by the music, the lights, the incense, assisting at a ceremony of which the meaning is as little understood as the miracle of the mass. In the grade schools, as in the parish churches, we have the humble workers, like Chaucer’s poor parson of the town, trying with pathetic endeavour to meet the needs and satisfy the desires of their flocks, under conditions of an educational and political tyranny no less galling than was the ecclesiastical.