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Traditionalists talked about mental discipline, and educational progressives wanted school to be more practical and more like everyday life, but Harris spoke of the value of "self-alienation." He believed that education should involve "a period of estrangement from the common and familiar. The pupil must be led out of his immediateness and separated in spirit from his naturalness, in order that he may be able to return from his selfestrangement to the world that lies nearest to him and consciously seize and master it." Without a period of self-alienation, the student would remain "merely instinctive and implicit." To create self-alienation, Harris suggested that the student needed to be removed from his familiar surroundings and allowed to "breathe the atmosphere of the far-off and distant world of antiquity for several years of his life." (p. 40)