EDUCATIONAL METHODS As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the value and function of each member of the community, however humble he may be.

We have come to believe that the most "brutish man" has a value in our common life, a function to perform which can be fulfilled by no one else.

We are gradually requiring of the educator that he shall free the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life.

We ask this not merely because it is the man's right to be thus connected, but because we have become convinced that the social order cannot afford to get along without his special contribution.

Just as we have come to resent all hindrances which keep us from untrammelled comradeship with our fellows, and as we throw down unnatural divisions, not in the spirit of the eighteenth-century reformers, but in the spirit of those to whom social equality has become a necessity for further social development, so we are impatient to use the dynamic power residing in the mass of men, and demand that the educator free that power.