Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/242

236 The school system is a manufacturing plant and as such its efficiency is properly judged by its output—that is, its graduates. These are subject to physical examination as properly as to mental examination. The boys in the last years of the high school seem encouragingly robust. They usually take a little lower rank in their classes than do the girls, but, as they would themselves express it, they do their work 'well enough' and when their lessons are done they have supplies of unexpended energy. In athletics they show considerable endurance and many boys partly support themselves by working in shops and offices outside of school hours. In their own homes they prove active, hungry and without excess of nerves.

The condition of the average girl is manifestly different. She appears to the casual observer anæmic, flat-chested, round-shouldered and out of symmetry, and a member of her family knows that she is fickle of appetite, regularly subject to headaches, nervous and irritable. Some of the girls are frivolous, devoted to 'society' and to trashy novels; the average is conscientious about her work and almost morbidly painstaking. She worries over every lesson until it is prepared as well as she can do it, probably after that because it is not done as well as some one else could do it. Her study—and her worry—exhaust her and any other work is a burden. At best she needs complete rest after graduation; at worst she joins, perhaps for life, the ranks of the women who are not strong. A large number of pupils leave the high-school before completing their course. More boys than girls drop out, it is true, but the boys go to earn a living or because they have not met the requirements of the school. The girl very often goes by her physician's advice.

If we consult a doctor for an ailing high-school girl he makes a diagnosis and a prescription almost at sight—"over-study; take her out of school." Often he does not find it necessary to inquire about any other habits of hers except her habit of study. But is her going to school the chief factor in the girl's breaking down? If so, things were better managed in the days of our grandmothers when no girl had much public schooling after she was fourteen years old.

If a girl breaks down under a course of study on which a boy thrives does it indicate that she has less mental power? We dislike to admit it and the experience of our teachers does not in general indicate it. Why should we attribute the widely different result to the one thing that is exactly alike for both sexes? Brother and sister come into the world with the same mental and physical heritage. The girl inherits tendencies of body and mind from her father quite as much as from her mother. The boy and the girl have the same food and the same course of study. At the high-school age the development of heart and lung and brain is at about the same stage in both sexes; the girl is a little nearer to her adult weight and height. What circumstances