Educational reformers seem always to be looking at education from the point of view of the individual scholastic enterprise and of the individual pupil, and hardly ever from the point of view of a public task dealing with the community as a whole. For all practical purposes this makes waste paper of a considerable proportion of educational literature. This literature, the reader will find, is pervaded by certain fixed ideas. There is a sort of standing objection to any _machining_ of education. There is, we are constantly told, to be no syllabus of instruction, no examinations and no controls, no prescribed text-books or diagrams because these things limit the genius of the teacher. And this goes on with a blissful invincible disregard of the fact that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of the thousand the genius of the teacher isn't and can't be there. And also of the fact that this affair of elementary education has in its essentials been done over and over and over again for thousands of millions of times. There ought to be as much scope left for genius and originality in ordinary teaching as there is for genius and originality in a hen laying an ordinary egg. These educational idealists are always disregarding the fundamental problem of educational organization altogether, the problem of economy, economy of the most precious thing of all, _teaching power_. It is the problem of stretching the competent teacher over the maximum number of pupils, and that can be done only by the same methods of economy that are practised in every other large-scale production--by the standardization of everything that can be standardized, and by the use of every possible time and labour-saving device and every possible replacement of human effort, not in order to dispense with originality and initiative but in order to conserve them for application at their points of maximum efficiency.