Again, how can we

requires a supply of genius which we cannot rely upon? eliminate the evils of the placing-out system which has spread so fast and far that, altho statistical data concerning its success are lacking, we are beginning to hear serious reports of its evils in the way of spreading moral infection and of manifold bad relations between adopted and natural children? What are the facts about the appalling mortality and morbidity of foundling asylums and how can both be reduced? How can we extend the educative influence of moving pictures which have greater pedagogic possibilities than any invention since printing and how can we reduce their present dangers to eyes and morals? But such questions are legion and I must close. Here child psychology has a vast and to a great extent newly opened field for applying what it knows and for learning more, and here all child helpers can greatly increase the intelligence and the efficacy of their work by coming in contact with the rich store of facts and principles for which this section stands and which we in a sense hold in trust as its custodians. Here we must have a new and vital bond between knowing and doing, for the two in many fields are yet sadly isolated. The National Child Welfare Conference is a forum where genetic psychologists work for the exceptional child, get together and put mutual questions, report results and pool their knowledge for mutual benefit. Our motto always is that the cause of the child is the most precious of all the world's causes because it controls the future.

HOW EVERY SCHOOL MAY BE A CHILD WELFARE

CONFERENCE

WILLIAM H. ALLEN, DIRECTOR OF THE BUREAU OF MUNICIPAL RESEARCH, 261 BROADWAY, NEW YORK CITY

(Synopsis)

Out-of-school conferences on child welfare can be successful only as they effect conferences on child welfare within the school and between school teachers and parents.

Because the majority of our twenty million school children are in small cities and rural districts, they are certain not to be fundamentally benefited by any conference that does not center in the schools. The same energy which an outside agency will spend in getting data for one thousand children, will interest one thousand principals in securing more complete data for five hundred thousand children.

The teacher whose pupils present to her one hundred and ninety days each year the best index of how thirty to fifty families live, can accomplish more than an out-of-school conference where one hundred and ninety people listen to a lecture and adjourn to meet again another day.

In New York City there are two hundred and thirty members of local school boards charged with the duty to learn about school progress, sanitary

conditions, and teaching efficiency of schools which are supposed to minister to nearly eight hundred thousand children. Systematically for years effort has been made to prevent these local board members from knowing the essential facts about school progress and school problems. Snubbed and almost reviled, this asset has been lost to New York City, tho potentially more valuable than any national conference. As a consequence no one can tell the parents of New York why two hundred thousand children have failed of promotion this school year, why there is a difference of one hundred thousand between net enrollment and average register, whether the parttime day, which New York City is spending millions to abolish, is better for the child than the full-time day, or why public imagination and sense of duty are focused upon giving out-of-door fresh air to a handful of children while neglecting to consider physical and mental breakdown, due to lack of out-of-door fresh air for hundreds of thousands.

To make every school a child-welfare conference, the supreme need at the present time is a demand on the part of the national and state bureaus of education for essential information as to the welfare of each teacher's pupils.

THE HYGIENE OF INSTRUCTION

WILLIAM H. BURNHAM, PROFESSOR OF PEDAGOGY, CLARK UNIVERSITY,

WORCESTER, MASS.

To most people school hygiene means the technique of heating, lighting, and ventilation, statistics in regard to children's defects and school diseases, and dry details in regard to seats, desks, and the like. School hygiene does have to do with all this, but with much more besides. In recent years a new field called the hygiene of instruction has been developed. It is based upon child psychology and mental hygiene. From this newer point of view school hygiene is positive rather than negative, and every subject of instruction, every educational principle, and every method of teaching is studied with regard to its effect upon physical and mental health.

We often hear it said among teachers that the great aim of education is to teach children to think, and in pedagogical literature we are beset with exhortations to make our pupils think. But how is it possible to keep them from thinking? Try your best and you cannot do it, except perhaps by one method, namely, by trying to make them think. The really important question is how pupils think and what they think about. The aim of education is to train pupils to think clearly, to think with ordinary associations, and to develop permanent interests and habits of attention. The aim of hygiene is much the same, and the hygiene of instruction maintains that the development of such habits is of vital importance to health.

All this has been strongly emphasized in recent years by the studies of psychiatry. In our hospitals and sanitariums there are multitudes of patients suffering from hysteria, neurasthenia, and like disorders, which

often can be cured only by a process of education. The modern alienist, the expert in such disorders, resorts to re-education as the best method of treatment. He develops habits of attention, permanent interests in healthful activities, self-control, habits of orderly association and of normal reaction to feeling, and the like; and the degree of his success is measured by the degree in which he succeeds in this mental and moral education. Now a moment's reflection reminds us that most of these sufferers from nervous and mental disorder were a few years ago pupils in our schools, and precisely these habits of attention and the rest are quite as important for preventing mental disorder as in the cure of such disorder. A better hygiene of instruction in the schools would have saved large numbers of these patients from the sanitarium and the hospital for the insane.

The aim of the hygiene of instruction in a single word, then, is to develop balance, control, normal expression of feeling, healthful interests, which are the means of self-control, attention and orderly association and freedom from confusion, interference of association, conflict and repression of normal reactions, and straightforward thinking and acting which are the safeguard and guaranty of mental health.

Now all this is delightfully vague. These are platitudes, you will say. Very true! But they contain the gold of wisdom tried a thousand times. Let us see if we can apply these principles concretely. In the ordinary school work there is a good deal of inattention, lack of control, mental confusion, worry. But if we observe the play-activities of children we find it is different. The children are attentive; they think clearly; and usually, except when in a highly organized group game they get rattled, they exhibit self-control. In a word we find in the child's spontaneous play a splendid illustration of normal mental activity. The same is true of the child's spontaneous motor activity in general. The attention, too, in a class in manual training as compared with the inattention in the ordinary scholastic class was long ago noted.

It is not for hygiene to say what subjects should be taught in the school; but when in any subject it is impossible to get that attention, and control, and orderly association of ideas that is possible in play and the various forms of manual and industrial education, then hygiene maintains that something is wrong; for bad habits of mental activity are being formed.

Again, the hygiene of instruction already has something to say about the method and content of instruction. Its teaching is based on experimental studies of memory. Many psychological investigations in regard to the associations of children have now been made. These are important because an association experiment is really a short question under laboratory conditions; and the answers give such a picture of the contents of an individual's mind that such experiments have already been used to diagnose mental disease and to detect crime. The method is familiar. A word is pronounced by the experimenter. The subject mentions immediately the

first word he thinks of; and the time from stimulus word to reaction is measured. The results of such experiments by Meumann and others show certain noteworthy differences between children and adults.

The first important difference between the reproductions of the child and those of the adult is that in the case of the child the association reaction time is much longer than in the case of the adult. This difference is so astonishing, says Meumann, that the experimenter often thinks that the reproduction is not taking its normal course, especially when difficult tasks are presented by the experimenter, but after a time the experimenter becomes convinced that these long reproduction times are typical of the child mind. In the case of the adult a free reproduction to a stimulus word occurs on an average in about four-tenths of a second if the association is a very fluent one, and from one to two seconds when it is a difficult one. In the case of children, on the other hand, the reproduction time is not infrequently from five to ten seconds. And further, the shorter the reaction time, the less valuable is likely to be the associated word or the answer. The practical inference is obvious. The questions that teachers ask are association experiments altho without controlled conditions. The prevailing custom of teachers to require pupils to answer as quickly as possible is in large degree a demand for what is impossible for children. So far as it is possible, it is likely to defeat the very end of instruction; for the answer is likely to be worthless. From the point of view of hygiene it may result in confusion.

Again according to the investigations of Ziehen and Meumann, there is a striking difference between the kind of ideas that the child reproduces and those which the adult reproduces. The child thinks more in individual, concrete ideas than the adult. In the case of the latter, individual ideas are seldom reproduced. Meumann in many thousand reproduction experiments with adults has found very few such, often only 5 to 6 per cent. in the case of a subject. The adult understands the stimulus word as a rule as a universal and abstract word and he passes over to universal or abstract word meanings. It is quite different with the child. He understands the stimulus word as a concrete individual idea.

It is a striking fact also that in the case of the more talented children at the age of six to twelve or thirteen there is a greater preponderance of the individual ideas than there is in the case of children of the same age of weak ability. If in a school class there are both intelligent and dull children, and they are tested by the reproduction method, the unintelligent children, the dull children, show more abstract associations than the bright. This result seems to emphasize the danger of premature development of the adult type. Such maturity is usually connected with intellectual inferiority. Thus Meumann concludes. As Meumann sums up the results, the whole ideation of the child is totally different from that of the adult in this respect, that it is

I Meumann, Vol. I, p. 228.

well established physiologically and pedagogically that a child should remain as long as possible in the stage of concrete individual ideas. He by this means acquires a great store of concrete perceptual ideas on which later he can build his abstractions; and the greater the store of concrete ideas, the more accurately and more securely the ideas presented are assimilated, the better and sharper will be the abstract word-meaning later.1

The child's exasperating memory for concrete and often apparently unessential facts is usually normal. The teacher's emphasis upon abstract relations is often wrong. Thus hygiene reviews all the methods and means of instruction with a view to avoiding premature or arrested development, mental confusion, and bad habitual thought.

Hygiene has made extended study of fatigue. It is a long story that I must not try to tell here; but, while recent studies indicate that within certain limits the power to resist fatigue can be increased, that even an active immunity to the toxic products of fatigue can perhaps be acquired, when fatigue produces bad thinking, something is wrong with the work, or the air, or the temperature, or with the teacher, or the pupil, or the surroundings, and if inattention is unavoidable it may be well to stop work altogether. This has been recognized in a degree by practical pedagogy, even to the extent of school closure. Take, for example, the spring vacation. Why should we have a vacation in the spring? Well, first of all, certain investigations by Lobsien indicate that the physical energy is at low ebb in March and April, and that there is a depression in the curve of psychic energy in April. One of our best neurologists has suggested that this may be the result of an old biological rhythm; but pedagogy knows very little about biological rhythms. The school was closed in the spring probably rather because of church festivals and interruption of school work, and the unavoidable mental confusion, or mind wandering, if you please, at this season. There are, as every teacher knows, many distractions at this period-some physical, some psychic, and others ecclesiastical, industrial, social, and amatory.

Modern studies show that there are certain more common but less obvious evils liable to occur in school instruction. There are certain secondary effects of instruction, certain by-products, to use the language of industry, which are often important. Pedagogy gives special attention to the primary results of instruction; hygiene studies also the secondary effects. In arithmetic, for example, we have many illustrations of these secondary effects of instruction. There are the tricks of thought, the mental automatisms, which may result from the premature or undue use of certain methods and devices. Dr. Triplett has studied these among normal-school students. Among cases reported are the following:

One girl who was taught to add and subtract by the aid of an abacus says: "For several years it was impossible for me to get away from those red and green balls, and to this day I scarcely add a column without recalling them unconsciously."

I Meumann, Vol. I, pp. 225-26.