from the common tendencies of the individuals of society. The positive tendencies give rise to worthy institutions. The negative tendencies give rise to unworthy institutions.

The unworthy institutions are large-scale systems for the indulgence of the lower instincts. War is the nationalization of the instinct of pugnacity. "What makes war difficult to suppress is that it springs from an impulse rather than from a calculation of the advantages to be derived from war."*

The economic system is dominated largely by the acquisitive impulse. Aristocracy and its accompanying institutions originate in the mastering impulse. Slavery is the product of the submissive impulse. Prostitution is born of the sex impulse, as are some aspects of the theater, music, dancing, the novel, and the magazine.

The habit of regarding institutions critically is important to a progressive society because of the inherent qualities of an institution. The institution converts knowledge into dogma and conduct into fashion. It establishes itself as an end and obstinately refuses to justify itself socially. The institution is impersonal and irresponsible. An institution is created to meet a specialized need but does not always pass out of existence when the need disappears. The institution mechanicizes conduct and this has the effect of dwarfing the personality. An institution lacks the suppleness and spontaneity which makes life genuine.

"Neither custom nor law are, as such, moral, immoral, or unmoral." The origin and the application of customs and laws are the particulars which give them ethical value. There is no more reason for the blind acceptance of customs than there is for the blind acceptance of individual opinion. The social sanction not the validity of a custom is the force which compels its acceptance. It is therefore a problem of inculcating the same wholesome criticcism of social sanctions as is commonly adopted toward individual sanction. The American educational system is charged with producing a nation of "uncritical drifters." At a time when investigation and discussion are most needed, we accept fixed

*Betrand Russell: Principles of Reconstruction.

forms of conduct and thought and enforce their universal approval. We hinder those most who are most conscientiously devoted to human progress. We ostracise those who would help us find the way out of the existing complexity.

"If we respected the rights of children, we should educate them so as to give them the knowledge and the mental habits required for forming independent opinions; but education as a political institution endeavors to form habits and to circumscribe knowledge in such a way as to make one set of opinions inevitable."*

Present education suffers from two great defects which hinder independent and disinterested consideration of existing social institutions. First, it is almost completely taken up with the acquisition of existing systems of knowledge. The learning of organized and dogmatized facts is the major occupation of students. Evaluations and free reactions are secondary to this acquisition of formalized information. Practical observation, judgment,

and skill are secondary to the study of subject matter. Second, present education follows in the wake of accepted opinion instead of helping to create opinion. The school reflects the established institutions of the present but does not point the way to the future. Indeed, education seems constantly to be catching up with the times instead of being the forerunner.

The economy and stability of a changing order are apparent to those who have acquired historical perspective. A proper social sense encompasses not only the distant person but also the distant day. The historically-minded person regards society as a developing process in which every generation shares. He does not expect that perfection will be reached in his own day for the enjoyment of his own generation. He is not impelled by an immediate end which is to bring peace and happiness to the world during the period of his own life. The kind of peace and happiness which the social man seeks comes from the participation in the process of development toward the higher order.

The social disturbances of our own time are the result of the *Bertrand Russell: Principle of Reconstruction.

accumulated errors of the past. Every period has it in its power to perpetuate the old injustices or to build for a better day. As the past generation is the heritage of our day, so our day is the heritage of the next generation. The violent upheavals of our time are the results of the opportunistic economy of the past. Every age is a struggle between the social forces of progress and those which hold tenaciously to the accumulated possessions of the day. The result is conflict, violence, and waste.

Institutions like men become superannuated, but men have a limited existence and institutions have not. Institutions offer a powerful natural resistance to extermination. Accordingly no institution should be created without its accompanying machinery for effective change. The makers of institutions, and this includes the great body of men, should have the habit of mind which regards institutions and change as inseparable as democracy and the elective system.

Our nation faces the educational task of transforming a population of uncritical followers into a population of intelligent and independent thinkers. A state whose citizens are untrained to form sound opinions independently will ever rest uneasy in fear of free speech and free press, the very instruments of its conception. The power to understand and to express the true worth of things and men and institutions is the greatest gift of a democracy.

Mental Yardsticks in Question

C. H. MATHES, PROFESSOR OF RURAL EDUCATION,
EAST TENNESSEE STATE NORMAL SCHOOL,

A

JOHNSON CITY, TENN.

RE we a nation of fourteen-year-old boys and girls trying to operate the most complex and dangerous machinery that the social mechanicians of the ages have invented? Is it really a matter of "heads or tails" whether we are going to steer this machine to a triumphant journey's end or smash it to smithereens in the ditch? Is the world's most hopeful slogan, "Democracy," always to be pronounced with a rising inflection and punctuated with an interrogation point?

At any rate the many articles that have lately appeared in leading periodicals, attempting to analyze the problems of democ racy in the light of the apparent revelations of the army intelligence tests, have administered a needed jolt to the complacency of the cocksure optimist. We have had at least a timely reminder that democracy is, after all, only an experiment being tried in the cosmic laboratory. In the great test-tubes powerful reagents are at work on mysterious compounds. Gas jets are glowing under crucibles, blowpipes are roaring, there is much simmering and sizzling, and the smoke and fumes are stifling.

But there is as yet no word from the Consulting Chemist upstairs, and nobody knows yet whether a new aqua regia has been discovered, or whether all the contents of tubes and beakers and retorts must be emptied into the sink and the whole experiment begun again, with new reagents, new processes, and new chemists.

After all, though, what else could any scientist wish? A poor chemistry it would be if one always knew in advance just what would be the result of the experiment. And in the end, no ex

periment is a failure. If it doesn't get the result expected, it may get a better one; at the worst, the record the chemist keeps will save the next experimenter from one particular failure anyhow.

For all that, it is well that we have a few doubts and misgivings, provided they do not weaken into mere gloomy forebodings. The right kind of misgivings will set us to asking questions and then to searching for answers.

The questions raised by the recent studies of army tests seem to have sifted themselves into two main groups. Those of the first group relate to the significance and validity of the "intelligence" tests themselves, upon which the more or less unhopeful conclusions of sundry writers are based. The questions of the second group assume at least the partial validity of the tests and are concerned with the soundness of the conclusions drawn therefrom.

I.

First, then, let us raise frankly the serious question whether the intelligence tests, so-called, are really, as one writer confidently claims, tests of "capacity to see things in relation, ability to grasp situations as a whole, and power to reason" (italics mine), or whether they are not, in a greater degree than their originators realize, tests of state of development of innate capacity, ability, and power.

Admittedly, the army tests are far more nearly "intelligence" tests than are any of the "general information" tests so much affected of late by popular magazines and unpopular pedagogs. We may well believe them to be the nearest approach yet made to actual yardsticks for measuring mental capacity, innate ability and power.

For all that, there are several points in which these tests are clearly measurements not of what the subject came into the world with, innate capacity, but of what progress he has made toward the realization of that capacity-not, to be sure, through the conventional educative processes of the school, but through