If our public schools really educated, if they understood that education involves a training of the instinctive and emotional life as well as of the intellect, if they saw that they cannot even develop intellect as long as they ignore desire, we should have an agency for adjusting the neurotic girl and boy second only to the home in its power. There is proof for this statement. Enlightenment is coming into education in spots. There are visiting teachers who work on the problem children in a school and get wonderful results. There are experimental schools whose methods are based on an understanding of the new psychology as it applies to educational theory. These schools are able to deal with the able but neurotic child who cannot get along in the public school. Those of us who work with difficult children are defeated constantly, not so much by the impossibility of the cases, as by the impossibility of finding any public school that understands or has time to act on its understanding. I am constantly trying to straighten out the children the public school can’t handle. Our school is not primarily educational but is a place to observe and get acquainted with difficult, dependent, or destitute children whom the various children’s agencies of Philadelphia are trying to place satisfactorily in homes. They are children who do not get along anywhere. Nobody wants them because they are so hard to manage. The thing that constantly surprises us is how easy it is to manage their behavior. They are not set like adults and a little understanding, a little insight, and patience, a mere approach to real educational methods gives immediate results that are almost like magic.[107] It is desirable that the school should eventually supersede the juvenile court and replace other welfare agencies concerned with the child, but in adapting itself to this task and to the task of general education it will be compelled to make provision for the development of the emotional and social life of the child as well as the informational, and in doing this it will inevitably approach the model of El Retiro as described by Doctor van Waters. CHAPTER VI THE MEASUREMENT OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE In the last chapter we have seen the development of definite methods and very positive successes, but everybody who deals with human beings professionally—the educator, the criminologist, the statesman—feels that he has no certain method for the control of behavior, that there are obscure and incalculable elements, that the same procedure does not secure the same results when applied to different individuals, that the successes are often as unintelligible as the failures, and that such successes as there are depend on common sense, personality, and trial and error rather than on any known system of laws.