Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/220

 206 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

year of the fourth gymnasial class. The following year the pro- portion was notably increased, but this increase was not main- tained. I found, in fact, that the proportion of 73.73 per cent, reached in the fifth (or highest) gymnasial grade fell to 68.39 per cent, in the first lyceal grade. I consider the reason of this to be that in the first grade of the lyceum there are many stu- dents from private schools and those of other localities, or from boarding schools where there are only the gymnasial grades ; and these new pupils, subjected to a discipline to which they were not accustomed before, do not make a good showing at first, and hence the smaller number of good marks in that year, from rea- sons not entirely dependent on the age.

In the second inquiry, following the proportional number of good conducts in the various years, I obtained a very significant graphic curve. The good conducts in the first years gradually decline, till they reach their minimum at the age of fourteen years, to rise again to higher levels in the successive years, as may be seen from the table on the preceding page.

Now, comparing the ages in which we note the minimum of the good conducts in the students and in the young men of the Casa Benefica, we soon see that there is a notable difference : the bad conducts among the students show a remarkable pre- cocity in comparison with the young men of the Casa Benefica. What I had observed in my examination into the nature of the latter class I found also in the deportment marks of the former; and as in the Casa Benefica this assumes a remarkable precocity in the well-fed classes in comparison with the others, so in the boarding schools the precocity of the bad conducts is also an indirect result of good nourishment, which brings on the pre- cocious arrival of that crisis, disturbing temporarily the moral equilibrium of the youth, exposing him to easier infractions of the rules, to less activity in his studies, and sometimes to cen- surable acts of sensuality, thus making it more difficult to main- tain good deportment. Only later do we find high averages of good conduct, and rather in the youth in good hygienic condi- tions than in the others. My observations were not very differ- ent from those of Sikorski on the young Russians. Studying