According to Dr. Harris, the function of the school is “to correlate the child with the civilization into which he is born.” “The branches to be studied, and the extent to which they are studied, will be determined mainly by the demands of one’s civilization. These will prescribe what is most useful to make the individual acquainted with physical nature and with human nature so as to fit him as an individual to perform his duties in the several institutions--family, civil society, the state, and the church” (1: pp. 232-233). These also will determine what interests in the child should be cultivated and what interests be checked. To make the child’s nature or its own spontaneous interest our guidance and standard is the suicide of education. For “man reveals his true nature not as a child, but as a mature man and woman in the process of making world history. In the world history human nature is revealed in its height and depth” (14: p. 492). Naturally it follows that psychology should hold only a subordinate place for the art or science of education, and “no philosophy of education is fundamental until it is based on sociology.” Prescription is thus the great word in Dr. Harris’s pedagogy, which he never tires of repeating. “The problem of prescription,” he says, “is the profoundest and most important one in education, and without its solution we continually drift in the eddies of fruitless experiments and waste the energies and possibilities of the rising generation” (5: p. 131). Of course Dr. Harris would not, in the face of the modern consciousness of individual freedom, advocate the tyranny of autocratic prescription. Here he met an antimony of civilization and consequently of education. “When we reflect that prescription comes in from the side of realized reason, and consists in regulations found to be rational by the experience of mankind and embodied in the institutions of civilization, we must be convinced of the utter hopelessness of eliminating this element from life.... On the other hand, that self-activity or spontaneity, freedom of thought, the realization of directive intelligence in each and every individual--that this shall prevail more and more, is our deepest national conviction” (5: pp. 141-142). The antinomy is solved by Dr. Harris in the Hegelian way. At first these two “are opposed, and mutually limit each other; where one begins the other ends.” However, “a mandate prescribed loses its external, mechanical side just as soon as its necessary ground is seen and comprehended” (5: p. 142).