conducted so simply that I could afford to run it even if I had no students! These simple provisions gave me an immense freedom.

The first experiment, a summer camp for boys, was started nearly thirty years ago, and is, I believe, the oldest camp in existence. They are now numbered by the thousand, and may be found in practically every State. My own camp began with a capital of three hundred dollars,-in those days a dollar went much further than it does now, and an enrollment of fifteen boys. It clearly offered something that was wanted, for it has paid its own way from the very start and is still prosperous and popular. It had last summer an enrollment of one hundred and fifty boys. The fee was made small, as it was never the purpose to attract rich boys, but rather boys from the more thoughtful professional classes, or even desirable boys who would be accounted poor. It is true that many rich boys came, for their parents found there a simple, wholesome outdoor life which they could not easily inaugurate at their own more elaborate summer homes. But they were all treated alike, and no extra privileges were purchasable. I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact that while I believe all schools should be self-supporting, I also believe that it should be the unfaltering effort of the headmaster to make the fee just as low as possible.

After seventeen very happy summers, I turned the camp over to two younger masters, and shortly after that, started another experiment, a boys' open air college preparatory school on my little plantation at Samarcand. But before leaving the subject of the summer camp, I might mention for the encouragement of other pioneers, that after a few years, as the enrollment increased, the camp became a source of adequate income. From my own limited personal experience, and much wider observation, I should say that all sound enterprises can be made, by good management, to pay their own way, and that the field for legitimate charity is much narrower than we commonly imagine.

In the case of the open air school, the initial outlay was naturally larger, but even here amounted to only twenty-five thousand dollars for everything. The equipment was by choice, as well as necessity, extremely simple, and we allowed ourselves only three luxuries,—a Steinway grand piano, the last edition of the

Encyclopædia, and a seven-passenger high-powered car. In selecting these two experiments by way of illustration, I do not forget that they were very simple and unpretentious and not at all comparable to the huge educational establishments to which rich men give their money, and paid officials their time. But both experiments were significant. I find that the men and boys who took part in them still look back upon those early days as a unique and fortunate experience. And both camp and school became the starting points for later ventures now serving large numbers of American boys and girls.

Without subscribing too literally to Kant's famous dictum that such conduct is ethical which one would wish to see universal, it was keenly felt that as an educational experiment, neither camp nor school would fulfil its whole purpose unless it could be imitated and made the starting point for a further advance. This was an additional argument for making them self supporting. The school was, of course, somewhat slower in reaching entire self support. In my own mind, I gave it four years to make good. Thanks to the skill and devotion of an able colleague, and the generous help of the junior masters, the goal set for ourselves was honestly reached, and at the end of four years we planned not only to continue the school but to double its capacity. The War came, however, and brought it to an end by requiring service elsewhere.

Parents are not, as a rule, educational experts,-they are sometimes curiously ignorant about even elementary educational methods,--but they do want, with almost pathetic eagerness, the very best thing for their children, and they need only to be convinced. It is this feeling which has led me to insist all along that educational experiments, to be valid, must supply something which, after due exposition and trial, is genuinely wanted by conscientious, intelligent parents. And if genuinely wanted, such ventures will be supported. This seems to me reasonable ground, and I was the more ready to act upon it in the case of summer camp and open air school because in still earlier years I had been one of the pioneers in introducing manual training as a culture branch in non-technical schools, and I had been deeply touched by the eagerness of parents to have their boys profit by a

system of instruction which appealed, it is true, to their common sense, but which still had its spurs to win.

We may well accept the considerable endowment of the past in the way of land, playgrounds, school buildings, workshops and general equipment, and also the small contemporary favor of omitted taxation. But to make the schools vital, effective, intimate, progressive, they must be the immediate concern of those whose interests are most vividly involved, that is to say of the parents whose children are to attend the schools. Such a participation would be helpful to both parents and children. It would result in variety and in wholesome competition. We would escape the uniformity so earnestly and in my opinion so mistakenly desired by the National Educational Association when it advocates a Federal Bureau of Education with enlarged activities, and powers of standardization. In the place of this deadly sameness, this educational mill, we might so easily have a genuine self-determination, with its resulting vivacity, interest, experimentation and sincerity. The parents and children, instead of being passive material in the grip of the educational process, the parents to pay taxes, and the children to acquiesce,—would be active agents, and through their own self-activity, their aroused spiritual participation in the educational venture, would gain an intellectual life, and an emotional and artistic delight which are not the necessary or even the common fruits of an alien administration. Education is an inner process, an unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit, and may only be realized through self-activity.

It is one of the curious anomalies in our spiritual make-up that the liberal and radical minds which fulminate most vigorously against our own control of the Philippines, and England's hand in India, and which cry out for political self-determination for everybody, everywhere, quite regardless of political development, would light-heartedly enter every American home, and prescribe under compulsion of law just what sort of education American parents shall give their own children. In Oregon they would go even further, and make all private schools impossible by the simple device of making the public school compulsory. But happily, the law was declared unconstitutional.

I much deplore the abandonment of our smaller, more intimate

district schools so near the real life of childhood, and the growing use of the motor bus to gather the children into large remote schoolhouses which have no educational merit easily discernible and offer a much smaller emotional appeal to the children themselves. Bigness may yield greater administrative convenience, but it does not guarantee excellence. The small school, near the homes of the children, may be made far more effective, and for the younger children, especially, far more convenient. In comparing the two, it is usual to offer the very modern school palace of today in contrast with the ancient district school of yesterday. The comparison is not fair. The same thought and money spent on the palace would create a series of model smaller schools where they were needed, saving the expense and waste time of transportation; and, more important still, saving the demoralizing effect of crowds. At the present moment, progressive business men are working for the decentralization of industry. Textile mills scatter themselves over the cotton fields; automobile making moves up the River Rouge; New York publishers send their copy out on Long Island, or up into New Hampshire, or over to New Jersey; manufacturing companies combine in order to scatter their industrial plants over a wide territory and so bring them near the consumer. Yet in spite of this significant experience, this growing tendency to take the work to the worker, instead of the worker to the work, educators continue to centralize education and to do it, curiously enough, in the name of progress.

In the case of colleges, universities and technical schools, the argument for self-support is even stronger than in the case of the lower schools, for the students are now of an age when they may properly and helpfully contribute toward their own support. At the present moment many of us who love education and have given a substantial part of our own lives to its furtherance, have regretfully come to the conclusion that too many boys and girls now go to college, too many who cannot offer the legitimate price of sound preparation and earnest purpose. Many of them go for purely frivolous reasons,-for the social distractions and sports; for the freedom which they gain in being away from home; for the chance to have a hand in class politics, dances, organiza

tions; many from simple restlessness and ennui, because they do not know what else to do. Their presence in such large numbers distinctly lowers the standard of both scholarship and morals. It is easily possible to go to college to one's harm, gaining no substantial good, but cultivating a chronic indolence, and the fatal habit of depending upon outer excitements instead of inner resources. The great danger of college life is that it makes boys and girls selfish and self-indulgent. We give too much and ask too little. We concentrate their attention upon their own personal advantage, and during holidays and the long vacation, upon the doubtful adventure of having a gloriously good time; and to this end we absolve them from all home duties and responsibilities, from all money burdens, and too often from even the necessity of good manners. Pour the wealth of the world into the lap of youth, and youth is stifled and spoiled. A better gift is that "refined poverty" which our Japanese friends strive for in their exquisite tea ceremony. There is only one way of becoming educated, and that is to educate oneself. And this can only be done through self-activity and self-restraint. Emerson said truly that men are as lazy as they dare to be. When we do for boys and girls, or for men and women, what they can and ought to do for themselves, we strengthen this tendency and invite deterioration. And I may add, as a lover of perfection, that we can hardly expect youth to escape the ugly exercise of selfindulgence, when they see their own parents and their elderly friends so habitually self-indulgent.

I am not optimistic enough to believe that the abandonment of endowment funds, here advocated, and their expenditure for legitimate purposes, will take place in the near future, or even all at once in any future. But I do believe that it will come about gradually, for already there are signs of intelligent discontent with the fruits of our present system; and intelligent discontent is ever the precursor of reform. In all the forty-eight States men are beginning to ask why we have so many schools and colleges and universities, and so few educated men and women; and they are no longer disposed to put up with the old stereotyped defense that the system is all right but that human nature is at fault. The obvious problem is to make the system work, and no excuses