Again and again in the course of this examination of the conditions of democratic evolution, we have had reason to look to education for a solution of many fundamental matters. It is indeed no longer possible to overlook the absolute primacy of the school in any progressive democratic polity; and if the foundations of the coming democratic commonwealth are to be well and truly laid, they must be laid around about the child. Our present purpose does not require that we should consider the actual machinery of the education proper to democratic development—that is a matter for the educator. Our business here and now is to consider the broad general characters of such an education. It is a commonplace that needs no labouring that modern education suffers many things from the “dead hand.” The tradition of the “grammar school” which aimed at opening the field of knowledge by a training in letters is still with us, despite the fact that we have become familiarised in recent years with a rounder and fuller conception of education. We have been told again and again that the business of education is to produce good citizens, to promote the growth of moral character, and so forth; and slowly this emphasis has made some headway in the minds of educational officials. But the whole implication of this conception of education is far from being realised, even by those who are actively engaged in the work of education. A disproportionate pre-occupation with “letters” and knowledge still remains to betray our bondage to traditional ideas; and this in spite of the fact that popular education has in recent years received a very definite orientation through the demand for industrial efficiency. But as yet there has not been—save in the region of what is called “technical education”—any serious and sustained effort to co-ordinate the whole subject matter of education to this particular end. “Technical” education appears in the scheme not as an integral or organic part of the process as a whole, but as a somewhat arbitrary and unrelated annex to the last stage of the process. To this demand that education should minister to industrial efficiency we shall have reason to return presently. Here we are concerned only with the fact that though this demand has been fairly general and insistent, it has not succeeded in shaking the hold of tradition upon the method of the educational process. Popular education still consists in the main of variations upon and extensions of the three R’s; and though the experts have discussed widely and in detail the ways and means of directing the educational processes to given ends, the solutions have not yet arrived in any very substantial way in the schools.