Let us consider the problem in the light of common-sense. Suppose, for example, that there is an ideal chair, some wonderful arrangement of perfect angles, hollows, and supports that will almost magically rectify or prevent every fault in the child’s physical mechanism. Suppose further that the child finds great ease and repose when seated in this ideal chair. How then can he avoid suffering the tortures of all that is uncomfortable, when he rides in the cars, or sits down in his own home, or visits a friend, or goes for a picnic on the river or in the woods? I see nothing else for it; when that ideal chair has been found, our child will have to carry it about with him wherever he goes. In the second place, how is it possible for this ideal chair to be miraculously adaptable to every age and type of child? Are we to treat children as plastic lumps of clay to be fitted to the model insisted upon by the lines of our ideal chair; or are we to study and measure each individual and have a chair built to his measure, once a year, say, until he is adult? No, what we need to do is not to educate our school furniture, but to educate our children. Give a child the ability to adapt himself within reasonable limits to his environment, and he will not suffer discomfort, nor develop bad physical habits, whatever chair or form you give him to sit upon. I say, “within reasonable limits,” for it is obviously absurd to expect a Brobdingnagian child to use a Lilliputian chair. But let us waste no valuable time, thought, or invention in designing furniture, when by a smaller expenditure of those three gifts we may train the child to win its own conscious control, and rise superior to any probable limitations imposed by ordinary school fittings. For the problem to be solved in education is that same problem which needs solution in the social, political, religious, industrial, economic, ethical, æsthetic and other spheres of progressive human activity. In every sphere of life we have for years given “effects” the significance of “causes” and have made worthy attempts to put matters right on this unsound basis. In the case of education certain symptoms have been recognised as more or less harmful, and the whole blame has been placed upon the method or methods of education involved. For at least half a century, the method of the social worker was conceived on the lines of giving money, food, and clothing to the poor, in an attempt to ameliorate their condition. The evils of this false policy came home to them in a practical way, and nowadays, the object of the social worker is to give the poor the “means whereby” of general advancement and of getting money, clothes, and food by their own efforts.