Our principal institution having opportunity for its object is education, and accordingly this has an increasing function arising from the increasing requirements that life makes upon it. Where it does not perform this function adequately we see the result in social failure and degeneration—armies of stunted children, privilege thriving upon the lack of freedom, the poor tending to become a misery caste, the prevalence of apathy and inefficiency. Since opportunity is a different thing for every individual, and requires that each have the right development _for him_, it is clear that education should aim at a study and unfolding of individuality, and that, in so far as we have uniform and wholesale methods, not dealing understandingly with the individual as such, we are going wrong. I recall that an able woman who had been a teacher in a state institution for delinquent girls said to me that every such girl had a desire, perhaps latent, to _be_ something, to express an individuality, and that the recognition of this was the basis of a better system of dealing with them. This is only human nature, and one way of stating nearly all our social troubles is to say that individuality has not been properly understood and evoked, has not had the right sort of opportunity. To find a response in life, to discover that what is most inwardly _you_, is wanted also in the world without, that you can serve others in realizing yourself; this is what makes resolute and self-respecting men and women of us, and what the school ought unfailingly to afford. The people who drift and sag are those who have never “found themselves.” When, after hearing and reading many discussions about the conduct of schools, I ask myself what I should feel was really essential if I were intrusting a child of my own to a school, it seems to me that there are two indispensable things: first, an intimate relation with a teacher who can arouse and guide the child’s mental life, and, second, a good group spirit among the children themselves, in which he may share. The first meets the need we all have in our formative years for a friend and confidant in whom we also feel wisdom and authority; and I assume that we are not to rely upon the child’s finding such at home. The second, equal membership in a group of our fellows, develops the democratic spirit of loyalty, service, emulation, and discussion. These are the primary conditions which the child as a human being requires for the growth of his human nature; and if I could be sure of them I should not be exacting about the curriculum, conceiving the harm done by mistakes in this to be small compared with that resulting from defect in the social basis of the child’s life. And it is the latter, it seems to me, which, because of its inward and spiritual character, not to be ascertained or tested in any definite way, we are most likely to overlook.