Whatever else the current system of education may do to the child, there is one thing which it cannot fail to do to him,--to blight his mental growth. What particular form or forms this blighting influence may take will depend in each particular case on a variety of circumstances. Experience tells us that what happens in most cases is that Western education strangles some faculties, arrests the growth of others, stunts the growth of a third group, and distorts the growth of a fourth. Is it intended that education should do all this? This question is not so paradoxical as it sounds. My primary assumption that the function of education is to foster growth may be a truism in the eyes of those who agree with it; but Western orthodoxy, just so far as it is self-conscious and sincere, must needs repudiate it as a pestilent heresy. For if what grows is intrinsically evil, what can growth do for it but carry it towards perdition? What is it that grows? It is time that I should ask myself this question. My answer to it is, in brief, that it is the whole human being that grows, the whole nature of the child,--body, mind, heart and soul. When I use these familiar words, I am far from wishing to suggest that human nature is divisible into four provinces or compartments. In every stage of its development human nature is a living and indivisible whole. Each of the four words stands for a typical aspect of Man's being, but one of the four may also be said to stand for the totality of Man's being,--the word _soul_. For it is the soul which manifests as _body_, which thinks as _mind_, which feels and loves as _heart_, and which is what it is--though not perhaps what it really or finally is--as _soul_.