3. There is therefore a question whether as a device for plan-forming by presenting the right material and definitions at the right moment, the school is not inferior to the world at large, at least when its influences are protracted. The school presents indispensable information, a technic for handling problems, such as reading, writing, and ciphering, and presents the solution of the innumerable problems which are already solved and which it is unnecessary to solve again. But the school works injuriously on personality development and creative tendencies. By presenting the whole body of cultural values in a planless way, planless so far as schemes of personal development are concerned, it tends to thwart and delay the expression of the plan-making tendency of children until physiological maturity approaches and the energetic, plan-forming, creative period is passed. The lives of creative men show that they began their work early and did it by hook or by crook sometimes by evading the schools, often by being the worst pupils. The chemist Ostwald in his interesting book “Grosse Männer” has pointed out that the precocity of such men as Leibnitz and Sir William Thomson would have done them no good if the schools had been “better” in their time. In measuring the influence of the school we must recognize two types of success in the adaptation of the individual to life, the one based on his assertion and realization of wide and original claims, the other on contentment with limited claims. If he is contented with claims which are more limited than his powers justify, his adaptation is success through relative failure. To the degree that the school treats children as identical it produces a maximum number of relative failures. To some extent the genius is regarded as a prodigy because so much spontaneity is repressed by the school. 4. Clinicists and case workers who handle successfully difficult children taken from the schools report that the schools tend to accentuate rather than obviate the difficult features. Some of them feel that where unsocial and neurotic tendencies have begun to appear through bad family conditions the school is an additional influence for evil to be overcome. The school reaches practically every child and does its part in deepening or lessening the neurotic tendencies. At present we are safe in assuming that for the most part it deepens these tendencies. It drives the neurotic child into truancy, vagrancy, anarchy, invalidism and every form of delinquency or hardens its emotional reactions into permanent moods, and it does all of this without in the least being aware of it....