Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/511

Rh Practical people and school authorities everywhere are forcibly aroused when they learn, through the statistical studies, that our public educational system is based upon a theory of the pupil's progress in school which perhaps miscalculates by two years the success of the ordinary child in passing through the grades. According to the estimate of retardation made by Ayres, the average child in the country at large would not complete the eight grades in less than ten years. This means unmistakably that a decided change must be made either in the curriculum or the teaching if our schools are to become adapted to the abilities and needs of the average child.

Group studies are being made of many other sides of child life. A recreation survey of the city of Milwaukee, made by Mr. Rowland Haynes, a field secretary of the American Playground and Recreation Association, brings out, as do similar surveys elsewhere, many facts which bear upon the most dangerous part of the child's day, the play hours. With about 350,000 tickets sold weekly on the average to shows in Milwaukee, 60 per cent, are to moving picture shows and 21 per cent, to vaudeville houses. The public has not begun to realize the tremendous possibilities of the moving picture show for good and bad. Again, this report shows that, after allowing 300 children to play on every usable acre of public and private play space within three districts tested, half of the thousand children enumerated would have to play in streets or alleys or not play at all out of doors in those districts. Perhaps even more significant of a condition of child development is that for 1,400 children observed in these districts outside of school hours, half of them were neither working nor playing, but doing nothing. Idleness, mischief and bad development probably correlate closely in the child's make-up.

For those who can stand statistics or, perhaps I should say, understand them, the frequent enumerations of child welfare conditions have served to demonstrate the needs and dangers of childhood. We have learned of the tremendous unnecessary waste of life through infant mortality, which is the most important health problem of the day, because proper care will here save the most lives. Statistics have also shown the need for medical and dental treatment for school children. Lying back of these problems are still more fundamental biological problems of eugenics and euthenics. A whole school of statistical experts traces its origin and inspiration to the personality and work of the late Francis Galton, who established just before his death the Galton Laboratory of Eugenics in London. The work of these eugenic experts and the biometrists is making it clearer every day that the problem of the mental defective is mainly a problem of heredity.

There is a childish query which aptly puts the question of inheritance and environment. A little lad was gazing raptly at the stove