Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/540

522 of free play. With adults application may profitably continue for longer periods, but even here the rhythm of concentration and relaxation must be observed in order that effort may have the most fruitful issue. There would assuredly be less dullness, carelessness, and disorder in our schools, high and low, and in our homes, if this law were observed in the arrangement of the activities of daily life. The writer knows of a normal school where the work begins at half past eight in the morning and continues until one o'clock, with a pause of only ten minutes in the middle of the session. During the passage of classes from room to room at the close of recitations, monitors are placed in the halls to prevent any exhibition of freedom in communicating with one another or in the movements of the body. Here there is little if any relief to the attention, since pupils are under practically the same constraint as when reciting in Latin, Greek, or geometry. This enthronement of discipline, which we all seem natively to think necessary that we may prevent the reversionary tendencies of youth, is sure to breed in some measure the very maladies—stupidity and disorder—which various agencies in society are striving to cure by all sorts of formulæ.

In the normal, well-organized adult brain the various areas are closely knit together by association pathways or fibers, which renders it possible to employ in particular direction the energies generated over large regions. But this development comes relatively late and is not fully completed under about thirty-three years of age, it is now believed. It is in a measure, then, impossible for the young child to utilize the energies produced in one part of the brain in activities involving remote sections. One who observes little children in their spontaneous activities can not fail to note evidences in plenty in illustration of this principle. It should be apparent, then, why a school programme so arranged that a lesson in writing is followed by one in written language, this by written number, and this in turn by written spelling, or possibly by a written reproduction of a lesson in Nature or literature, is admirably suited to exhaust the overused areas of pupils' brains, whereupon the mental and physical effects of fatigue make their appearance. In one of the large cities of our country the amount of time spent in writing was calculated for all the grades in the schools, and it was found that at least one hour was required of the children in every grade, and in the fourth and fifth grades they were engaged for two hundred minutes every day in writing in some form or other.