_Individuality._--A large proportion of those pupils with a well-marked individuality can develop their personality even in the school. The tendency of the school is in many cases to rub off the edges and corners of individuality. But it is impossible to approve of the extent to which, in the public elementary school of to-day, the children’s individuality is repressed. Our present elementary schools do not individualise enough. Their principal aim is, not so much to provide a sound education, as to force all the pupils through the same rigid curriculum, without making any allowance for their various special aptitudes. (For what good end is it that the modern educational authority should regulate every detail of school-life, down to the quality and price of the articles used in class, and even to the colour of the manuscript books and the precise number of pages they are to contain?) In the elementary school of to-day, owing to the large size of the classes and the small number and defective training of the teachers, individualisation is impossible. _Beauty._--The school must not indeed attempt to make all the children into artists; but the children must most certainly be taught to understand and appreciate beauty--that is, the arts. Our present public elementary schools are extremely defective from this point of view. _Knowledge._--Knowledge gives the individual power, and provides him with a powerful weapon in the struggle for existence. The dominant classes, for the protection of their own egoistic interests, keep knowledge for themselves, and refuse to provide the lower classes with the means and weapons for their liberation. The State insists upon a minimal quantity of knowledge for every one of its members, because this is to the interest of the community and of the upper classes. But since to impart to the common people anything beyond this minimum of knowledge would threaten the dominance of the upper classes, or would at any rate involve pecuniary sacrifices on the part of the latter, and since it might even lead to the liberation of the lower classes, the functional activity of the public elementary schools is kept at as low a level as possible, and is limited as much as possible both intrinsically and extrinsically. The State and the upper classes devote to popular education only such an amount as is found to be absolutely essential. They are well aware that much more could be done than is done in the way of popular education; but since they know also that this would redound chiefly to the advantage of the lower classes, they propose no advance upon the present system. This affords a satisfactory explanation of the fact that the modern State spends so much less upon elementary schools than upon middle or high schools--that is, upon institutions for the upper classes, and why the State spends so much less upon education in general than upon other things. The budget of any modern State would exemplify the