What is meant by an independent thinker? Evidently one who is not indebted to others for the inferences which he draws or the conclusions at which he arrives. Many practices at school are subversive of habits of independent thinking. The assignment of lessons of such length and difficulty that the weaker pupils must rely upon their stronger classmates for help, or resort to “coaches, keys, and ponies” for assistance, makes them helpless instead of self-reliant, and cultivates the memory at the expense of the understanding. The lessons should be graded so as to beget the sense of mastery. Every difficulty that is overcome by a pupil’s own efforts tends to develop in him an ambition to conquer other difficulties. Few, if any, joys can be compared with the ecstatic joy of victory. Moreover, it should be the aim of the teacher to beget in the pupil a love of truth more potent and profound than reverence for a favorite authority. On the contrary, the feeling of independence and the desire of distinction by differing from other people may grow into a passion. This seldom does much harm in the case of an editor or a professor. If you give either of them leave to criticise and to print, he is well satisfied. If he is elected to a board of managers or the national assembly, his critical faculty and his fondness for finding fault and thinking differently from other people may make him a hinderance to the leaders, who must get things done, or cause him to stand apart, like Ewald, in the German Reichstag, as a one-man party, whose views must be ignored on all questions requiring prompt action or immediate decision. To counteract this tendency in a youth of strong personality, it is difficult to devise anything better than the moulding supremacy of class-spirit, the chastening influence of a contest in the literary society, and the relentless lessons which a boy gets on the play-ground when he will not play because the game does not go his way. Independence of thought in the quest of truth, on the one hand, and concert of action for the public good, on the other, are two of the most useful lessons to be learned at school. At this point there is room for a kind of child-study apart from a syllabus of set questions, and leading to results which cannot be tabulated in statistics or averages. The average in such cases is untrue as a guide, and may be utterly subversive of correct habits of thinking, or the correct method of dealing with the individual. To give enough optional or specific work for the brightest, and not too much general or required work for the slowest, is an ideal hard to realize in the assignment of work, and yet of supreme importance in the endeavor to develop habits of independent thinking.