Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/318

306 The immediate effect of this beneficent statute is to stimulate teachers to get the pupils along more regularly and speedily through the grades and toward the completion of the required minimum of work.

Equally marked is the effect of the new law upon the board of education and the superintendents as a stimulus toward providing means for helping the pupils forward.

By the establishment of special classes for the deaf, the dull, the crippled, and the recent immigrants over the age of twelve years, the normal children are freed from the presence of those who might be dragging backward, and wasting the time of the teacher and the normal children, hindering their regular advancement. School nurses to the number of forty, co-operating with the school physicians in New York city, follow up the pupils dismissed by reason of contagion or vermin, and get them back into school at the earliest possible moment, thus playing the part of scientific attendance agents, improving the regularity of attendance at school, and helping the pupils to cover the required work before the arrival of the fourteenth birthday.

Play centers, where the pupils spend in peaceful, useful, directed play the afternoons, evenings, and Saturdays (formerly so fruitful of that idleness which leads to petty offending), contribute to the intelligence and good behavior of the school children and to their ability to cover the required work before reaching the age of fourteen years. It is necessary to visit the roof gardens on the school buildings in the summer evenings, and to see the thousands of children under the direction of teachers and caretakers, dancing happily and decorously to the music of the bands furnished by the board of education of New York city, before it is possible to appreciate what New York is doing for the protection of its children from the temptations of the streets.

Excellent as is the effect of the statutory requirement of specified school work to be completed before the child leaves school, in stimulating efforts of teachers, superintendents, and members of the board of education, it is perhaps more far-reaching in its influence upon parents of pupils who are to be wage-earners, inducing them to keep the children in school with greater