work with boys and girls primarily, and not articles and reports, that we need. We know well that the child's strongest characteristic is activity, and yet how little do we utilize his activities in teaching! We are remiss in this principally because we do not know just what activities to utilize, nor do we know what sort of occupations will utilize the activities he possesses. From impression to expression is a slogan which we have heard so frequently of late that it rolls off our tongues like many religious sayings which have no significance. The idea is correct, but who has made a study to show the varying application? Knowledge of ethical principles is only slightly valuable until it has given rise to activities in harmony with them. The boy who learns to denounce rascality in historical characters, and then goes out to the playground and cheats, lies, and terrorizes those weaker than himself, might almost as well have left the literature unstudied. According to James' theory, the lessons are worse than wasted. In all ethical training we need to enlist the services of the youth in definite active moral enterprises. To weave ethical teachings into the fiber of their lives we need to secure their co-operative activity in assisting the needy, relieving suffering, protecting the weak, preventing cruelty to animals, ministering unto the sick, bringing sunshine to minds. clouded by sorrow and distress. We need to emphasize more the gospel of service. The gospel of feeling has received its due share of attention. With proper service, feelings will take care of themselves. Children should be taught that no man liveth unto himself, and that genuine service rendered unto others is the highest morality. Advanced thinkers clearly see that educational practice has too long maintained the scholastic divorcement of home and life interests from school duties. Our attitude has been a vestige of the period of world renunciation. But we are beginning to believe that education is life and all life is education. Now, how to identify these interests and occupations so as to secure an ideal education and an ideal life is the problem to which few have really addressed themselves in the interests of the child. We need many more investigations like those of Dr. Dewey. Another problem demanding our attention is that of juvenile offenders. Every city and town has its cases, all too numerous, to deal with. Lucy Page Gaston is authority for the statement that 17,000 child criminals are arrested yearly in Chicago. It is gratifying that noble men and women are studying this problem and attempting to secure juvenile courts and corrective institutions whereby these children, largely the victims of vicious environments, may be shielded from further vice and helped toward reform. But far too little has been attempted in the way of prevention. Moral typhus pervades the atmosphere of thousands of luckless urchins, who, unless the disease is stamped out, or they are rescued from its contamination, will become infected just as certainly as tho living in the pesthouse amidst smallpox. Our legal philosophy is inconsistent when it assumes the right of the state to isolate and punish criminals and does not assume the right of the state to withdraw the child from the cause of such crime, or require the home and community to furnish surroundings conducive to right living. Instead of punishing the child as a criminal, every parent whose children under sixteen years of age are brought into the police court should be punished. The parents are the culpable ones. Neglect and indifference of parents is the antecedent of most childish delinquencies. Dr. Wm. T. Harris says: "If I were to name one product of vice or crime that would nearest touch the heart of all good people, I would say the neglected child. Give me the child, and the state may have the man. Every case of vagabondage has its root in some neglected child." In this work we must secure the co-operation of the clergy. Ministers should be trained in child study, and should devote a considerable part of their time to child-culture questions. It is pathetic that the churches have done so little for the child and have spent their time and energies in trying to convert confirmed sinners, a task psychologically almost impossible. The new note in education and religion must be prevention, rather than cure; formation of character, not reformation; righteous growth, not redemption; positive development, not repression. More effective training of children would lessen the number of adult sinners. Jesus said, "Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." Children must be trained to walk in paths of rectitude, and not, when adults, converted from their evil ways. We must also secure the co operation of physicians and lawyers. They have much expert knowledge that may be utilized in the service of the child. From personal conferences with many physicians, I know that they are very sympathetic with many child-study problems, not alone questions of physical welfare, but intellectual and moral problems as well. The lawyer can render expert testimony and helpful suggestions concerning child-labor laws, juvenile courts, corrective institutions, dependent and abandoned children, etc. Finally, we must secure the co-operation of business-men and the homemakers. When a question comes to the point of legislation and execution, teachers and scientists play a very unimportant rôle. The lawyer and the capitalist make laws, and the lawyer interprets them. The schoolmaster teaches obedience to them. Last winter, when certain educational laws were before the Iowa legislature, it was said that the teamsters' union was more effective than the State Teachers' Association. The teacher's voice is one crying in the wilderness. He is a prophet, not a lawyer. The teacher may say what he will about cigarette smoking, but his words of wisdom go unheeded. Whenever the railway managers find that the cigarette fiend is an inefficient operative they can immediately secure reformation among their employes. Because of these conditions there must be a joining of forces. I am not sure that there should be any local child-study societies as such. If the child-study specialists and the teachers could ally themselves with the mothers' clubs, the civic leagues, good-government clubs, etc., and there consider child-training questions as one among others, would not the net results to the child be greater? If our National Educational Association could bring into its ranks the lawyer, the doctor, the editor, and the business-man, if we were not so dissociated from everyday life interests, instead of being identified with them, we could much more easily reach the public ear and arouse public sentiment. In conclusion, I desire to suggest some of the most pressing problems for child study. Better child-labor laws, the establishment of juvenile courts, segregation of juvenile offenders from confirmed criminals, compulsory education laws in every state, the execution of such laws, fewer children per teacher, better utilization and supervision of playground education, an educational journal that appeals to the home and the school, the establishment of the kindergarten in every hamlet and city in the United States, the co-operation of the clergy, the lawyer, the doctor, the business-man, and the home. The child study of the future should deal not less with anthropology, but more with pedagogy; not less with intellectual training, but more with moral; not less with a study of origins, but more with shaping of destiny; be not less curative, but more preventive; not less psychological, but more sociological. May the scientific interest of the specialist be not one whit abated! But he should seek to couple with this more of practical usefulness than he has in the past. The interest of the teacher should not be in the theoretical consideration of the science, but in the practical application that may come from well-formulated principles. The schoolroom is not the place for experimentation upon children, and the teacher should not be an experimenter. It is well if the teacher has had scientific training; but the sooner teachers and parents learn that child study in the home and in the school is primarily for the good of the child, secondarily for the good of the teacher or parent, and only incidentally for the sake of the science, the better it will be for the child and for the reputation of the science. THE CHILD-STUDY DEPARTMENT OF THE CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS MISS ANGELINE LOESCH, VOLUNTEER ASSISTANT CHILD-STUDY DEPARTMENT, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, CHICAGO, ILL. With the advice and co-operation of Dr. W. S. Christopher, the Chicago board of education organized the department of child study in. July, 1899. The three members of the department, Mr. F. W. Smedley director, Mr. C. C. Krauskopf and Dr. D. P. MacMillan, assistants, have therefore just completed their third year of work. The first period, sixteen months of that time, was devoted entirely to certain investigations into the physical condition of the Chicago school children. There were taken and recorded for each child measurements of his height, standing and sitting, weight, strength of grip, lung capacity, and tests of hearing, sight, and endurance. Records of place and date of birth and nationality of parents were kept, as well as careful notes on any marked defects of growth or development. For tests of grip, an adjustable dynamometer invented by Mr. Smedley was used, and the ordinary wet spirometer for lung capacity. Sight and hearing were tested, the former by Snellen's test type card, and the latter with Seashore's audiometer. Mosso's ergograph, somewhat modified by Mr. Smedley, was used as a test of endurance and an indication of general nerve strength. Its results were recorded in kilogram centimeters; time given, ninety seconds. In all, 6,259 school children were examined, 2,788 boys and 3,471 girls. These included all the pupils of four large elementary and two high schools, besides eighth grade and kindergarten in others. After compilation of data, the fruits of this work were many tables of average height, weight, etc., for boys and girls of all ages; and these were designed to be used as a basis of reference for much of the department's later work. To obtain these norms had been the whole object of the sixteen months' work. Whatever individual advice as to incipient nervous disease, defects of hearing or sight, was given to pupil or teacher was. merely incidental. The gaining of norms, the establishment of a physical basis for comparing children of one age with those older or younger, the boys with the girls, the dull children with the bright- this was the purpose to which all else was secondary. Specifically, the results may be put in the form of one concrete example. According to the department's statistics, a Chicago school boy ten years old, if of ordinary physical and mental development, could be described, in average numbers, as follows: Height, standing Height, sitting Weight BOY OF TEN YEARS Amount of work possible in 90 seconds Strength of grip, right hand Strength of grip, left hand Lung capacity 4 feet, 31⁄2 inches 2 feet, 4 inches 63 pounds 16 ft. pounds 36 pounds 34 pounds 97 cubic inches He is able with either eye alone to read type three-eighths of an inch square at a distance of twenty feet. In all these respects the boy of ten years is just ahead of the girl of the same age. She is one-half inch shorter, two pounds lighter, grips four pounds less, and is eleven cubic inches less in lung capacity. Needless to remark, her eyes and ears are just as good as his. When this boy is fourteen years old he is five feet tall, a gain of eight and one-half inches (the major part of it, by the way, in length of limb); he weighs ninety-four pounds, has a lung capacity of 146 cubic inches; his strength of grip, right hand, is sixty-two pounds. While the girl of ten was in all respects the physical inferior of the boy of ten, when they are both fourteen we find the case somewhat altered. The girl is now one-half inch taller than the boy, and three and one-half pounds heavier. But in other respects he still surpasses her. In a word, he has kept his superiority in strength but lost it in size, a loss only temporary, of course. The possession of material for such comparison ad libitum was the result of the child-study department's first year and a half of work, a labor more satisfactory, perhaps, than that of the next year, because the more definite; but more statistical, and so less interesting. The latter half of the work, extending approximately over fourteen months' time, may be looked upon as of two sorts: 1. The application to various school problems of the norms gained. 2. The approaching of the more difficult and delicate task of gaining a few psychological norms; these to be employed afterward along with the physical. Of the former, i.e., the use of the physical norms, we shall presently speak more fully; of the latter, the psycho-physical work, only a little can be said. It is both unscientific and uninteresting to dwell on a half-finished task. Suffice it to say that the children's power of constructive imagination, of immediate visual and immediate auditory memory. have been subjects of experimentation. Criticism and discussion of method were here of course very important. After repeated trials and |