Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/317

 LAWS FOR PROTECTION OF CHILDREN 305

would settle the question of school attendance between Colorado and Illinois. It is much to be wished that such an examination might be made in both states, but especially in Chicago.

Meanwhile it is obvious that that statute which requires them to complete the whole work of the first eight years of the schools affords better protection to the children than that which, like the statutes of Illinois, merely requires pupils to attend school until they reach the age of fourteen years, regardless of what they learn or fail to learn, and supplements this perfunctory attendance by the demand that such as have not learned to read and write must thereafter attend a night school. Reading fluently and writing legibly are very elastic terms. Children are sometimes described as able to read fluently when they can repeat in parrot fashion a few lines of the first reader. It is related that, after a change of administration in New York city, the reader used for testing children who came to get their "working papers" was changed by the examiner at the office of the board of health, and many children failed during the next week because they had been taught by their older brothers and sisters to read just that por- tion of the previous reader which had been used for years as the test for all comers. In Chicago the writer has known many pupils who dropped out of the third-year class in the schools, nominally able to read, but so little habituated to reading that after two or three years they had wholly lost the art.

New York, while requiring a smaller amount of completed school work than Colorado, goes much farther in this direction than Illinois ; for New York requires that, before leaving school, pupils shall have had, since the thirteenth birthday, 130 days' attendance in school, in which they must have received instruction in "reading, writing, geography, English grammar, and the fundamental principles of arithmetic up to and including frac- tions." This is the work which a child would normally complete who entered school at the age of six years and was regularly promoted to the age of twelve years. The statute having taken effect in 1903, it appears that the number of pupils is very large who have spent the years in school, but have not completed the required work and achieved the required promotions.