To say that the function of education is to foster the growth of the soul, is to issue a challenge to Western civilisation, which is based on the belief that the end of Man's being is not the growth of his soul, but the growth of his balance at the bank of material prosperity.

To say that the function of education is to foster the growth of certain faculties, is to insist on what no one who had given his mind to the matter would care to deny.

For even the orthodox, who regard Man's nature in its totality as intrinsically evil, admit without hesitation that there are faculties in Man which can be and ought to be trained; while the "man of the world," whom we may regard as the most typical product of Western civilisation, is clamorous in his demand that education shall foster the growth of certain mental faculties which will enable the child to become an efficient clerk or workman, and so contribute to the enrichment of his employer and the community to which he belongs.
The Western educationalist will admit, then, that the function of education is to foster growth; and if you ask him what it is that grows or ought to grow under education's fostering care, he will give you a long list of faculties--mental, for the most part, but also moral and physical--and then break off under the impression that he has set education an adequate and a practicable task.

But he has set it an inadequate and an impracticable task.

For behind all the faculties that he enumerates dwells the living reality which he cannot bring himself to believe in,--the soul.