Naumburg's depends on no processes thus readily visible. It is a getting beneath the smooth misleading surfaces of children and correcting, admittedly by very delicate arts, what may be wrong there. It is psychological reconstruction. As the school itself states it, the purpose is "to reach the personal problem of each child and to master it as a means for his development. . . . The causes of a child's problem are not to be found on the surface. It is necessary to trace them back to the early impulses hidden beneath the external action." And, still more definitely, "Education in the sense of 'leading forth' what is already there, is not enough. The child comes to the school with physical inhibitions and emotional fixations which must be analyzed back to their elementary components, in order that his energies may be released for proper growth." Inasmuch as every grown person of any sensitiveness will admit that his own childish development was distorted by wrongness of some secret, unsuspected sort, it is apparent what a fundamental undertaking this is, and how incomparably more important, if adequately carried out, for the child's proper growth, than his early introduction to the multiplication table or even, more modernly speaking, to the jig-saw.
But schools of this order are still few. For a child who isn't within reach of one, how much may be done by super-parents in a super-home? Obviously, a home cannot remedy the state of a child whose development has been deflected from the psychologist's point of view, since it is to home conditions that his very difficulty will doubtless be referred. And how can a home supply, for little children, that factor of group association that recent educators regard as so important? As matters now stand, children have very little group life before they are six years old. But it is believed that the need for it occurs much earlier and that meeting this need results in a highly desirable "socialization"—to use the slang that the subject entails—of the child's interests and behaviour. It is true that this point is made by the same teachers who insist upon the importance of approaching a child as an individual, not as a mere member of a class or "grade." But as Miss Naumburg explains, "It is a mistake to consider the individual and the group concepts as really antagonistic. The instincts that underlie individual and social life are both inherent in mankind, and the realization of either is impossible without the other. There can be no developed
