avoid imposing upon defective ones and especially to prevent abnormalities from developing in these directions. School administration now recognizes the essential need of trained specialists to examine into the health of the children, to the end that their physical well-being may be competently considered and properly guarded, for we now know that mental progress depends far. more on sound normal health than we had even suspected heretofore. And especially have we learned that defective physical life lends itself readily to moral degradation in later life. As a result of the clearer knowledge of these facts, it has been found wise in Germany to establish a system of Hilfsschulen, or auxiliary schools, into which are gathered from the grades those defective children who are suffering on account of neglect and who at the same time are hindrances to the progress of normal children. It has been found that under special treatment and considerate care many of these children, who would otherwise get little or nothing from enforced schooling in the regular classes, develop into useful and worthy learners. The school physician will soon be as necessary a part of our school machinery as he already is in other lands.

4. As the result of a great variety of studies, I think we can safely say that it has been made clear to us that one of the best ways to get at the moral nature of the child is thru good health and proper environment, both in the school and out of it. This point of view is not a new one, but it has been greatly emphasized, clarified, and strengthened thru the study of those degenerate children, who cause the world so much trouble in their later lives. I think we have come to see in a convincing way that the child is not conceived and born in sin, but that he may be conceived and born of unworthy parentage and their physical weaknesses may entail upon him conditions which make it harder for him to live a normal life than for children not so handicapped. In other words, we have found that good physical inheritance, proper nourishment, pure air, and wholesome physical exercises and play, are often the best preventives as well as the best correctives in things moral.

5. Thru careful study of the games and plays of children, we have learned that these have developed to fill the natural needs and demands of child-life, and that they are better adapted to the physical growth of the normal child than any gymnastic exercises yet devised. And furthermore, that thru these games and plays children are brought into the most normal social and ethical relations. These studies have had a large influence upon the growth of the movement for larger playgrounds, as well as upon physical culture in general. They have operated to bring the teacher to see that thruout the ages the instinct for play has unconsciously directed children toward self-education, and has vital relations to growth and unity of personality.

Children who are cheated out of large opportunities for play, are thereby seriously hindered in their education. "Childhood is for play," says Groos, and whether we accept this dictum as it stands or not, we must feel that we now know enough to demand playgrounds and ample ones for every public school in our land. If this is not a new gospel, it is now felt to be a truer one.

6. We have learned thru study of the native interests of children that much of the schoolwork we have insisted upon has had no vital effect upon their childish lives and has aroused no active participation therein. As a result of this point of view, school men have been forced to more careful consideration of the curricula, to question carefully the needs and reactions of children, and to attempt to adjust the elements in any worthy education to the active organizing interests of the child-mind. This changed point of view is not wholly the product of the last twenty-five years, but it has been emphasized, clarified, and brought to our attention in so many striking ways that it has come to be a large element in our professional consciousness. Interest is one of the most significant words in our educational vocabulary. This conception touches our schoolwork at every point and charges teachers to carefully inquire into the relations of their work with the child-mind. The emphasis derived from these studies has had much to do with the enlargement and modification of curricula; it has changed elementary science into naturestudy; it has changed sailor geography into home geography; it has helped to eliminate much from arithmetic and to modify very materially the methods of dealing with that which we now give. It has curtailed grammar and enlarged literature, and has been a large element in eliminating brutal punishment from the schoolroom. It has made the work of the teacher more joyous, more endurable, and has helped to establish relations between pupil and parent previously impossible.

7. Interesting studies, such as those inaugurated by Mr. Johnson concerning rudimentary society among boys, have brought to light the peculiar ability of boys to deal with boys. Out of these general studies have come all sorts of organizations for self-government and self-control; we may cite such movements as those typified by the George Junior Republic, the Columbia Park Boys' Club, the School City, and many more of like nature. School management and control have largely shifted their point of view from devising rules to prevent breaches of discipline, to earnest attempts to so condition the children while in school that they will realize that schools and teaching are devised for them and not for teachers. Meanness in school is no longer a sin against the teacher, but against the school and school-fellows. The word discipline has largely given place to management, and even this word contains a growing content of co-operation. Consequently the days of flogging indiscriminately and injudiciously have about disappeared. And real true whole-hearted obedience in the schools is more in evidence than ever before. Those teachers who knew no better and who could keep school only by vigorous applications of the rod have been almost eliminated. School government has come to be more a matter of moral training and social co-operation.

8. It has been made plain by many studies that the meanings put into common words by children are far more varied and far less exact when compared with adult standards than the world had previously supposed. The ignorance of children concerning the common events and facts about them, especially

of those children brought up in cities, is far more dense than our teachers had taken for granted. The experience of the modern city child is so narrow and incomplete that it is impossible for us to suppose that it puts into language and literature any adequate sort of rational relations. The contents of the minds of children upon entering school in no sort of way fulfill the standard taken for granted by the average teacher. Investigations in this field have brought out these facts very clearly. It is an important contribution to bring to the attention of those preparing to teach and who have not made any serious attempt to get into touch with the thought life of children.

We have come to see thru studies of the mental life of a child that it depends for its content far more upon its environment than we had expected; that not only are children influenced by the environment in the school, in the home, and in the church, but by ideals gathered from the general community in which they live. We learn, too, that those ideals which appeal to them are derived from the active lives of the adults who surround them. In other words, social imitation is far more significant than the world had previously understood.

The results of these studies have made us realize far more fully than before how easy it is for us to misinterpret and misjudge children because their words are used to carry only their meanings, and our words are used with a meaning they cannot fully receive. When teachers realize these things, the facts operate to influence them in at least three ways: They select words to accord with experience; they strive more diligently and intelligently to enrich the pupil's experience in order that they may better understand each other, and they also see that the meaning of words may be, and often must be, absorbed from the teacher's attitude toward them and their relations to words already more fully known. Those words, freighted with meanings the child cannot interpret, must not be imposed, but they can become a most effective means for suggesting meanings, enticing thought and prefiguring possible experience.

These facts have also had a decided bearing upon textbook making, on the selection of the material presented in a course of study, and have especially emphasized the importance of real contact, and real experience with a manysided world. We know better now than we did before, that ability to reproduce words and definitions does not signify ability to understand them.

9. Numerous studies have brought to light many interesting facts regarding the emotional and intellectual conditions of the early adolescent period. It has been found that it is a period when new emotions, new sentiments, and a new outlook upon life, are born; it is a time when old connections are enlarged, new thought relations are established, new instincts are awakened, and new interests dominate. In this period the egocentric attitude begins to give place to the altruistic, religious emotions are awakened, large ideals are formed, and personal initiative suggests new attempts and new points of view.

Those teachers and school authorities, those preachers and anxious parents, who have caught the meanings of these larger views of youth, and have sought

to follow their guidance, have come into an intelligent, conscious, sympathetic relation to young people otherwise vouchsafed only to those rare personalities known as "born teachers."

The facts connected with the development of the emotional and religious life of youth, ought, and in time will, make it clear to Sunday-school teachers that at the present time nearly all of their time is wasted, because it is spent in trying to deal with religious notion and feeling totally beyond the experience of the little children. They will come to see that religious education, in a formal and intense way, should be put off until the beginning of adolescence and continued thru it in a wholesome way.

The old theological notion that children are conceived and born in sin is dying out, and this phase of child study has hastened its coming extinction.

The Chinese have not been handicapped with such a doctrine, and have wrought on the basis that children are naturally good, and proper education will keep them so. This phase of child-study has brought into prominence, too, the necessity of supplying young people with those opportunities of personal initiative in literature, art, and invention, which correspond to wholesome and legitimate desire on their part. It has emphasized the importance and helpfulness of those teachers who can command the interest and respect of young people thru sympathy and wise adjustments of the demands of life to the ideals characteristic of this period.

THE DEPENDENT AND THE DELINQUENT CHILDREN IN THE HOME ENVIRONMENT AS A SCHOOL PROBLEM

J. K. STABLETON, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, BLOOMINGTON, ILL. This is a study of the work attempted in Bloomington, Illinois, a city of thirty thousand, for the past six years. A statement of the Illinois Compulsory School Attendance Law, the Juvenile Dependency and Delinquency Laws, and the Child Labor Law, is necessary to make clear the conditions under which the work has been carried on.

In brief, the Compulsory School Attendance Law says that every child between the ages of seven years and fourteen, not physically or mentally incapacitated for schoolwork, shall attend school the full number of weeks the school is in session in the district in which the child lives. It makes the proper enforcement of this law the duty of boards of education and empowers them with the right of employing attendance officers to look after this work. The 'aw holds the parents finable for non-compliance with it and on failure to pay the fine they may be committed to jail.

The State Child Labor Law supplements the Compulsory Attendance Law and takes away the temptation that comes to many parents to take children from school for purposes of gain before the children have had even the minimum of school privileges the state gives them. This law does not permit any child between the ages of seven years and fourteen to be employed

at work for wages during any part of any day while the schools are in session; and holds both parents and employers responsible for violation of the law.

A dependent child is one practically without a home; or the place it calls a home provides but little or nothing for physical, mental, or moral needs of the child. When the child almost or wholly lacks support, it is according to the law, dependent.

The Juvenile Delinquent Law declares a child to be a delinquent when he is incorrigible, does not have home control, is found living in the companionship of wrong-doers; is guilty of petty crimes; and in general is tending to become a criminal.

If the parent or parents are not able to require the proper conduct on the part of the delinquent child; or, in case of the dependent child, cannot, or will not, and cannot be made to support it, as a last resort the court can take charge of the child and place it in the care of a probation officer or commit it temporarily to some institution to be cared for as a state or county charge.

These laws must all be thoroly understood by the school authorities in any Illinois city that attempts to make the schools reach the dependent and the delinquent children in their home environments.

Someone may say at once, is there not more danger of breaking up homes than there is hope of building them up by the enforcement of these laws? Let me say at the beginning that above all things, the school must stand for the unbroken home. Nor do we believe that it is right to think that all homes can in any sense be ideal homes. It will take generations for the evolution of even a common type of a home out of some homes, yet these types of homes that are only a shade better than the brute prepares for its offspring, must be protected in the possession of the children, and the touch of the school must be an inspiring touch, rather than the hand that would snatch away the children to train them in a higher type of a home or institution.

But we must remember that death does not respect the populous home of the poorest-paid day-laborer; that from this home the father or mother, or both, are sometimes taken; or that the bread-winner is striken with a wasting, lingering illness, and that as a result want comes in. And that in every city there are a few children whose parents in some cases care so little for them, or in other cases have so little power of control, that some controlling force outside the home must be exercised to hold back these children from criminal lives and give outlet to their energy in lives that will fix habits of useful activity. It is not the vengeance of the law but a labor of love that is the keynote in all this work; but the fact that there are good laws under which the few extreme cases can be reached makes the labor of love possible in the many cases.

Six years ago there was no systematic effort made to look after the dependents and the delinquents by the school authorities. When children, and especially those of the delinquent type, dropped out of school they were largely left to themselves. At this time the superintendent stated to the board that there was need of an attendance officer to assist in securing the attendance of