SCHOOLS are agents of passage between youth and the social order. They are intended to transform plastic minds into skilled and knowing persons and substantial characters. They are an attempt to organize environmental pressure in the guidance and promotion of intellectual, social, and personal growth. On the side of physical operation and maintenance, these agents of passage create problems of finance and of construction. On the side of function they create problems of organization and administration and of the arrangement of teaching materials. On their psychological side they require a knowledge of the nature of youth, of its interests, abilities, and methods of learning. On their service side they require a knowledge of the needs of society. Society is a consumer of educable goods in the sense that it depends for its maintenance and development on the character and training of the youth that are passed on to it by all forms of environmental pressure but ideally, at least, by its schools. Within the limits of financial resources, and of the insight of political and social leaders, young persons must be trained in accordance with their abilities and up to the limits of their human nature so that they can effectively satisfy the shifting hungers of the social group. In America, these hungers concern in one way or another not only a democratic government but a democratic way of life. They concern also the operations that are necessary merely to sustain, to say nothing of promoting and persuasively recreating, our chosen forms of culture. More for the sake of orientation than as a statement of fact, the needs of society are roughly divisible into two types. The one type may be called enduring and the other sustaining. The enduring needs are