Only the person who by knowledge has obtained a view of the great connected system of existence, the connection between nature and man's life, between the present and the past, between peoples and ideas, cannot lose his education. Only the person who, through the mental nourishment he has received, sees more clearly, feels more ardently, has absorbed completely the wealth of life, has been really educated. This education can be gained in the most irregular way, perhaps around the hearth or in the field, on the seashore or in the wood; it can be acquired from old tattered books or from nature itself. It can be terribly incomplete, very one-sided, but how real, personal, and rich it appears to those who for the period of fifteen years in school have ground out the wheat on strange fields, like oxen with muzzled mouths! Our age cries for personality; but it will ask in vain, until we let our children live and learn as personalities, until we allow them to have their own will, think their own thoughts, work out their own knowledge, form their own judgments; or, to put the matter briefly, until we cease to suppress the raw material of personality in schools, vainly hoping later on in life to revive it again. CHAPTER VI THE SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE I should like to set down here briefly my dreams of a future school, in which the personality may receive a free and complete self-development. I purposely say "dreams," because I do not want any one to believe that I am pretending in the following outline to give a reformed programme for the present time. My first dream is that the kindergarten and the primary school will be everywhere replaced by instruction at home. Undoubtedly a great influence has proceeded from that whole movement which has resulted, among other things, in the Pestalozzi-Froebel kindergartens, and in institutions modelled after them. Better teachers have been produced by it; but what I regard as a great misfortune, is the increasing inclination to look upon the crèche, the kindergarten, and the school as the ideal scheme of education. Every discussion dealing with the possibilities of women working in public life exalts the advantage of freeing the mother from the care of children, emancipating children from the improper care of their mothers, and giving women possibilities of work outside of the home. Mrs. Perkins Stetson proposes as a compromise, that every mother, pedagogically qualified, shall take care of a group of children along with her own. But what her own children will receive under such conditions is sufficiently shown in the case of those poor children who grow up in educational institutions presided over by their parents; and also by the experience of the poor parents who are not able under these conditions to look after their own children.