And because he cannot bring himself to believe in the soul, he deprives the faculties which he proposes to cultivate of the very qualities which make them most worthy of cultivation,--of their interrelation, their interdependence, their organic unity.

In other words he devitalises each of them by cutting it off from the life which is common to all of them, and so paralyses its capacity for growing in the very act of taking thought for its growth.

He forgets that every faculty which is worth cultivating both draws life from, and contributes life to, the general life of the growing child.

He forgets that the child himself--"the living soul"-- is growing in and through the growth of each of his opening faculties; and that unless, when a faculty seems to be growing, the life of the child is at once expressing itself in and renewing itself through the process of its growth, its semblance of growth is a pure illusion, the results that are produced being in reality as fraudulent as artificial flowers on a living rose-bush.
But the whole question may be looked at from another point of view.
Let us assume, for argument's sake, that the function of education is to train, or foster the growth of, certain faculties, which are mainly though not exclusively mental, and that when those faculties have been duly trained the teacher has done his work.

What, then, are the faculties which education is supposed to train?
In my attempt to answer this question I will confine myself to the elementary school,--the only school which I can pretend to know well.