Recent educational experiments,[74] and not least that most testing of all school examinations, the war, have shown us that we must revise all our old notions as to cleverness and stupidity. We know now that, short of real mental deficiency, there is or ought to be no such personage as the dunce. Just as the criminal is generally a man of unusual energy and mental power directed into wrong channels, so the dunce is a pupil whose special powers and aptitudes have not revealed themselves in the routine of school life. And just as the criminal points to serious defects in our social system, so the dunce points to serious defects in our educational system. The striking record of our industrial schools and reformatories in the war shows what young criminals and dunces can do when they are given a fair field for their special gifts. One of the chief lessons to be drawn from the war is the need for a new spirit and outlook in our national education from the elementary school to the University. We need a system which treats every child, rich or poor, as a living and developing personality, which enables every English boy and girl to stay at school at least up to the time when his or her natural bent begins to disclose itself, which provides for all classes of the community skilled guidance in the choice of employment based upon psychological study of individual gifts and aptitude,[75] which sets up methods of training and apprenticeship in the different trades--or, as I would prefer to call them the different professions--such as to counteract the deadening influence of premature specialization, and which ensures good conditions and a sense of self-respect and community-service to all in their self-chosen line of life, whether their bent be manual or mechanical or commercial or administrative, or for working on the land or for going to sea, or towards the more special vocations of teaching or scholarship or the law or medicine or the cure of souls. No one can estimate how large a share of the unhappiness associated with our existing social system is due to the fact that, owing to defects in our education and our arrangements for the choice of employment, there are myriads of square pegs in round holes. This applies with especial force to women, to whom many of the square holes are still inaccessible, not simply owing to the lack of opportunities for individuals, but owing to the inhibitions of custom and, in some cases, to narrow and retrograde professional enactments. The war has brought women their chance, not only in the office and the workshop, but in higher administrative and organizing positions, and not the least of its results is the revelation of undreamt-of capacities in these directions.