George S. Counts was amajor figure in American education for almost fifty years. Republication of this early (1932) work draws special attention to Counts’s role as a social and political activist. Three particular themes make the book noteworthy because of their importance in Counts’s plan for change as well as for their continuing contem­porary importance: (1)Counts’s crit­icism of child-centered progressives; (2)     the role Counts assigns to teachers in achieving educational and social re­form; and (3) Counts’s idea for the re­form of the American economy.