Page:Solution of the Child Labor Problem.djvu/130

123 ideal class for elementary work is twenty, good results cannot be secured, nor even anticipated, in classes containing four times that number.

Another factor which militates against continuance in school is the repressive character of the school discipline. To "sit in order" and "study" are occupations which grow dreadfully monotonous. Bodily energy accumulates, and must be worked off, yet in the average school no provision whatever is made for any kind of exercise that will relieve the feelings. Manual training in some form would answer, but that requires money, and no extra funds are forthcoming.

Thus the school system with its defective curriculum, its imperfect, overworked machinery, its young, inexperienced teachers, and its repressive discipline, forms in the aggregate an ogre from which the child turns to the burden and the soul-destroying monotony of factory work.

Here, then, are two causes, the needy family and the defective school system, which are immediately responsible for child labor.