What are the results of the present-day school? Exhausted brain power, weak nerves, limited originality, paralysed initiative, dulled power of observing surrounding facts, idealism blunted under the feverish zeal of getting a position in the class--a wild chase in which parents and children regard the loss of a year as a great misfortune. After the examinations have been passed and the year gone by, the best students realise the need of beginning their studies in a living way at almost every point. The majority of students are unable to read even a paper with any real profit, and those who are given a book in a foreign language to which they have devoted innumerable hours, very seldom understand it completely, unless the language instruction of the school has been supplemented at home. The incapacity to observe for one's self, to get at the bottom of what is observed and reflect upon it, is constantly more remarkable, as a result of the preparation system at school, even when this is aided by the mothers hearing lessons at home. The late Professor Key said that it was his experience, as teacher in a medical institution, that scholars in school were incapable of seeing, thinking, or working. I have heard the same observation made in Stockholm lately in a government office, that the young men were incapable of taking up practical duties in which they should have shown the knowledge they were supposed to have after the fine examination they had passed. The system then does not serve even secondary ends; to all the higher aims of human existence it is directly opposed. In the course of a hundred years or so, experience of this sort will cause the downfall of the system. Then, perhaps, these dreamed-of schools will arise. In them, the youth will learn first of all to observe and to love life, and their own powers will be consciously cultivated as the highest values in life. By mixing children of all classes together, the upper class, provided it still exists, will get that "colouring of earnest character which it now lacks," as Almquist said long ago; the lower classes will get the polish, that general cultivation they now lack. Through these schools, where common training is given to all, the natural circulation between all classes will be furthered. The aristocrat's son and the workingman's son will change places, if nature has made the first adapted for the position of the second, and _vice versa_. Through these schools the country child will always be able to grow up in the country, and need not be sent for educational purposes into the city, provided there are still great cities. Finally boys and girls will enjoy in them all the advantages of co-education, without the particular capacities of each being forced into the uniformity of a common examination system.