But this word _efficiency_ has become discredited by its recent use. We have heard something of efficiency engineers who have tried to reduce human faculty into mathematical formulæ for the purpose of speeding up and suitably supplementing the mechanical processes of industry. It amounts to no more than a systematic endeavour to fit the human agent to the machine so as to get more out of the machine. The result for the life of the human agent as a whole is hardly taken into account. And even if this myth of efficiency engineering has met the fate it deserved, its very appearance and name are symptomatic of the general direction of popular thought upon the main business of a community. Nor is this confined to the classes that are interested in getting the utmost out of the worker, or to the unreflecting public. The British National Union of Teachers at its Annual Conference in 1916 declared that “this great war, with its terrible wastage of human life and material has brought into bold relief the economic potentialities of the child. As never before, the nation now realises that efficient men and women are the best permanent capital the state possesses.”[56] So that the business of education is to develop the economic potentialities of the child in order to provide capital for the state. It does not appear that the child has any rights in the matter at all. He is to be trained in order to become “the best permanent capital” of the state. It is to be hoped that two more years of war have brought a more fruitful vision to the National Union of Teachers. Footnote 56: Quoted in the _Public_ (N.Y.), July 6th, 1918. Yet the word _efficiency_ is worth keeping, for it embodies the true conception of educational aim so long as it is rightly interpreted; and industrial efficiency must be allowed to enter into our interpretation of it. Industrial efficiency gains its preponderant emphasis in recent discussion because we are still in the toils of the disastrous illusion that the national ideal is national wealth. We think of the nation’s well-being in terms of its financial prosperity; and naturally we tend to subordinate all our social processes to this end. But the result of this tendency will be to create not a society, but a wealth-producing machine; and those human possibilities in which the final wealth of life lies, will have to fight a doubtful battle for their very existence, and at best can gain no more than a precarious foothold in the interstices of the money-making organisation.