Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/315

Rh to increase the number of books read during these first three years of school. We should but deprecate the tendency and do all we can to stop it. During these three years the pupils are growing faster than during the following years. At this time there is a decrease in the nervous energy of the child. In recent studies of the order of development of motor adjustments and coordinations, it has been found that the individual first acquires control over the larger muscles and later over the finer ones. The normal activity of the child exercises mainly the larger muscles. The plays of children give the widest scope to the exercises of such muscles. The coarser movements are most predominant while the finer adjustments and the use of the smaller muscles are of secondary importance.

By our improved forms of modern education all this is changed.

"We put the six-year-old child to the task of reading and writing. These acts involve the use of the smaller muscles of the organism and are dependent upon more exact control of these muscles than any other act the individual is ever likely to be called upon to execute in later life. If an adult is out of practise in the use of the pen, a single hour's work is sufficient to exhaust the hand. The extreme exertion which the child puts forth to guide the pen or to follow line upon line with the eyes is so far in excess of the amount of energy required by an adult that we are not in a position to appreciate the severity of the child's task. Children upon entering school have better control of movements involving the whole arm and the wrist than of those involving the wrist and fingers. The muscular control of the eyes is adequate for all free movements of the eyes, but not sufficient to warrant the finer adjustments of continuous reading. The loss of nervous energy, necessitated by reading and writing, at the ages of from five to eight years is an unwarranted drain upon the health of the child. At this age the child needs free and vigorous movements rather than the constrained and finer ones required in reading and writing. At a later age the control over the finer muscles is adequate for the task, but in this age of rush we are crowding our little ones and inverting the order of nature. Furthermore, the tissues of the globes of the eyes are still soft and the strain of the ciliary and other eye muscles is likely to cause short-sightedness by increasing the anterior-posterior axis of the eyeballs. If the child's eyes do thus lengthen under the excessive strain, the eyes are not only weakened for vision, but they become diseased organs.

We have thus far attempted to establish the following four propositions. (1) The human eye was evolved for distant vision and the perversion incident to reading and writing would lead us to expect some great injury to the organism. (2) Although the eye may easily adjust itself to a light changing from one-to ten-candle power, the diversities of daylight during the hours of the school day and