The truth is, however, that the purpose of the school and the college is not to create an intellectual aristocracy, but to educate, to bring out the individuality, the originality, the latent powers of talent and genius present in what we unfortunately regard as “the average student.” Follow Mill’s advice. Instead of aiming at athletics, social connections, vocations and generally at the professional art of money-making, “Aim at something noble. Make your system such that a great man may be formed by it, and there will be a manhood in your little men, of which you do not dream.” Awaken in early childhood the critical spirit of man; awaken, early in the child’s life, love of knowledge, love of truth, of art and literature for their own sake, and you arouse man’s genius. We have average mediocre students, because we have mediocre teachers, department-store superintendents, clerkly principals and deans with bookkeepers’ souls, because our schools and colleges deliberately aim at mediocrity. Ribot in describing the degenerated Byzantine Greeks tells us that their leaders were mediocrities and their great men commonplace personalities. Is the American nation drifting in the same direction? It was the system of cultivation of independent thought that awakened the Greek mind to its highest achievements in arts, science and philosophy; it was the deadly Byzantine bureaucratic red tape with its cut-and-dried theological discipline that dried up the sources of Greek genius. We are in danger of building up a Byzantine empire with large institutions and big corporations, but with small minds and dwarfed individualities. Like the Byzantines we begin to value administration above individuality and official, red-tape ceremonialism above originality. We wish even to turn our schools into practical school-shops. We shall in time become a nation of well-trained clerks and clever artisans. The time is at hand when we shall be justified in writing over the gates of our school-shops “mediocrity made here!” IX I assume that as liberal men and women you have no use for the process of cramming and stuffing of college-geese and mentally indolent, morally obtuse and religiously “cultured” prigs and philistines, but that you realize that your true vocation is to get access to the latent energies of your children, to stimulate their reserve energies and educate, bring to light, man’s genius. The science of psychopathology now sets forth a fundamental principle which is not only of the utmost importance in psychotherapeutics, but also in the domain of education; it is the principle of stored up, dormant, reserve-energy,—the principle of potential, subconscious, reserve energy.