tion of less than two hundred, lies contiguous to Kirksville, a town of 10,000. Conditions were appalling; farming practices were poor. It is inconceivable that there could have been such isolation and such extreme individualism so near a good town. There was absolute lack of cooperation, local initiative, and, most tragic of all, lack of local faith in the possibilities of bringing about a permanent régime of progress. How a small group of intelligent taxpayers and a resident teacher-leader changed the "old order" with the limited resources of the typical school district is a gripping story. This sketchy outline shows conditions in 1912 which are only too general in rural sections. Look at it today! There are: a flourishing farmers' club; an active woman's club; a poultry club of young people that in three years has driven out "scrub" poultry; a pig club which will do for hog breeding what the poultry club has done in its field; an interdenominational Sunday school; a high-school annex, where its students are able to make 4 units of accredited work; a community band, numbering 20 young men and women; a junior band of 14 members.

It has touched every interest of old and young, holding to the farm every boy and girl grown to maturity. Not one has been lost to the community during the five years, excepting in the several cases where the family moved out of the district for business reasons.

Thru cooperation, this school has become more than a community center; it is in fact a distributing center of efficiency, social and economic, used every day in the week, twelve months of the year. Its people are happy, contented, striving for the better things in life, and intensely patriotic, because they are an informed people. War found this community in a state of "preparedness." The following is an incomplete statement of war service by this community (their total land values being assest at some $112,000.00) between July 4, 1917, and July 1, 1918:

Adair County has 80 school districts. Under similar conditions Adair County would as cheerfully have furnisht $1,326,640.00. Missouri's 114 counties, under similar conditions, would have yielded $151,236,960.00.

Two of this community's young men are volunteers in the Army, two in the Navy, and the others are bravely restraining their desire to enlist and are making more acres yield more food for the United States and her Allies-allowing themselves to be drafted in order to render such service. The hour demands this service. Teachers, 100 per cent American in their

ideals and purpose, are as imperative in the rural sections of this country as are loyal and competent officers with the American Expeditionary Forces.

THE STATUS OF THE CHILD, STATE AND NATIONAL, AS A
RESULT OF THE WAR

W. H. SWIFT, SPECIAL AGENT, NATIONAL CHILD LABOR COMMITTEE,
NEW YORK, N.Y.

At the time when our country was about to enter the war for the vindication of the right and for the ultimate establishment of better worldconditions for all people there was great anxiety lest this war should, as all former wars had done, levy the most onerous tribute upon the children of our land. We knew that in England and France children had been hurried away from school to do the work of men in the shops and in the field. We knew that delinquency had increast fearfully in England, and that the best authorities traced this increase to the unusual conditions caused by the war. We knew that it had been said on the floor of the British Parliament, "A large portion of our elementary-school system is in ruin"; and that Mr. Sidney Webb, speaking of England, had said, "Peace will involve almost the remaking of the nation's educational machinery."

We knew that there were men in our own country ready to use the war as an excuse for drawing children from their books and their necessary play into the shops and fields, ready to use the war as an excuse for continuing the exploitation of childhood; and these men were not negligent in their business or in the molding of public opinion to their own end. There ran over our country a sort of wave of demand that all laws enacted for the protection of workers, whether adult or child, be suspended for the term of the war. In fact, the legislatures of one or two states took legislative steps to that very end.

How much irreparable harm was done by that first wave of eagerness to throw children into the work of the conduct of the war no one will ever know. In Kansas we know that the following resolution was adopted by the Board of Education and transmitted by the State Superintendent of Education to county and city superintendents:

Resolved, That superintendents and principals be advised that in view of the war situation and the food crisis the State Board of Education will approve granting a full year's credit to pupils who, having passing grades, find it necessary to withdraw from school before the end of the school year, either to enlist in the military service or actually engage directly in food production.

There were no requirements as to physical fitness for the work. Some of the superintendents, however, did make certain requirements for their own school. The State Superintendent did not know and had no way of knowing how many children were excused from school to their lasting hurt.

In Missouri the State Superintendent sent on April 13, 1917, the following:

Excuse at once from your high school all boys over fourteen years of age who will go out to farms and work. Give them full credit for their year's work at the end of the school year with the standing that they have at present. . . . include boys who live in the country and boys who will go to the farm to work. Extend the privilege to girls where you deem it advisable.

No one knows how many dropt out of school.

After May I in Illinois "to work on the farm was accepted as an excuse for absence from school, provided the boy was over fourteen."

In Indiana, at the suggestion of the canning factories, the State Department of Public Instruction recommended that the opening of the schools be delayed so that the children might work in the canning industry.

When we remember that wherever a detailed study has been made it has been found that farm work is the chief cause of the absence of children from the public schools in rural communities, we see how significant these facts become. The schools were disrupted, with the excuse that we were in war and that the labor of children was needed-and all this in a time of unequaled prosperity. Boys, without any regard to physical fitness and without any careful investigation of living conditions or moral surroundings, were sent out to be exploited by farmers. The whole scheme threatened to be destructive to our educational system and to child life.

Fortunately, however, things were not so bad as they seemed to be. In our depression we were forgetting for the time the native good sense of the American people, and that they do not willingly surrender high ground either in peace or in war. A second and deeper wave of thought swept over the country contradicting or rather submerging, except in certain narrow straits, much of the evil influences of that first wave. America now lives and works in this second wave, and there is no good reason for thinking that our sober second thought upon this very serious matter will not endure and control.

The result of the whole war movement is a new status for the child in both the state and the nation. There has been such a tremendous change

in the public thought that we seem to be at the beginning of a new era. At the point where there seemed to be a weakness of the line of defense drawn around our children strength has been added. W. E. Hall, National Director of the United States Boys' Working Reserve, says:

We arrived at the decision to make minimum age sixteen for boys who leave home to work on farms, and then only after a careful examination of all the conditions surrounding farm life. . . . . The United States Boys' Working Reserve deals almost entirely with the city boy, who in many instances is leaving his home for the first time to live amid strange surroundings. It is most important that he be mature enough to take care of himself under all conditions, and that he be strong enough to stand the rigors of hard work on the farm.

I quote from a bulletin of the United States Bureau of Education:

Aside from casual work, chores, and the like, which might be done outside of school hours, the labor of boys under fourteen years of age is not a vital factor on the farm. City boys without farm experience are not generally useful under sixteen years of age. There appears to be nothing in the present or prospective war emergency to justify curtailment in any respect of the session of elementary schools.

The United States Commissioner of Education stated the general thought of the country when he said, "I do not believe that there is any need for taking children from school or for shortening school terms."

There are three reasons for this recent strengthening of the line of defense for children. The first is that whoever has taken the trouble to make inquiry has found that children under sixteen years of age are not wanted and cannot be profitably used in farm work. In time this in itself would have cured much of the evils of the first period.

The other two reasons are much more fundamental. There is an increasing but largely unexprest consciousness of the inalienable right of every child to make the most of himself. This is not new. Circumstances have simply brought it more clearly into the foreground for the time being. The natural law of sympathy has borne its just fruit in forcing us to think of our own boys and girls. What was it that held our closest attention in those first months of the war? Not the marching of the hosts of men as they hurried to the trenches. We expected that. It was the devastating of Belgian homes and the ruthless scattering or slaughtering of Belgian children and the great losses suffered by the children of England and France by reason of the war. Thinking of the child over there has turned our eyes upon our own children over here.

The result is that the American people, now keenly conscious of all human rights, are ready to say that every child in this country must be given a free, fair, fighting chance to make the most and the best of his individual life. Democracy demands this and will be content with nothing else. Our soldiers upon their return will feel keen disappointment if they find that we have allowed ourselves to accept any lower standard. American ideals demand that society, the state, should hold itself responsible for the proper care of every child and should actually see that every child has a good home, good food, proper clothing, proper education, his opportunity for play, for recreation, and for growth and all-round development—a fair chance at life for every child. In our time that is what we understand to be the rights of a child.

But we are not now thinking so much of the individual rights of the child. Our chief concern lies in the state, in society in the aggregate. It is principally this which has saved us from the foolish destruction of much of the good work already done. We are at this hour bending our energies to preserve, develop, and perfect our civilization. The war has forst us to realize far more fully than ever before that our nation, any nation for

that matter, needs most and must have, first of all, men and women able to do and endure to the uttermost. At this hour of stress and strain the chief demand is for intelligent, efficient, human power, and we know that this same intelligent, efficient man power will be our best asset, that upon which we may rely, after the war. We can make machines; we must grow men. The war has taught and is teaching us the economic and social value of the child. We are profiting by the lessons already learned in both England and France. Our great desire is to see ours become a country in which all men are strong and women are their equals, and in which the child is to be one of the chief concerns of the nation. The people of America have spoken in plain terms and have declared that the child must be cared for. The time is ripe for the making of great strides forward. Everybody is looking for it. Social thinkers and educators will blunder if they do not make the most of their present opportunities and of the aroused state of public opinion.

Much valuable work has already been done, not only by the Bureau of Education, but by the Department of Public Health and the Children's Bureau of the Department of Labor. We are just beginning to become conscious of how very much the national government can do in the development of a proper citizenship. In view of all these matters I now raise for your consideration one question, whether it is not time for the nation to make appropriation for the aid of education in the states where it is needed, and for the creation of a Department of Education empowered to direct and regulate in a more extensive manner the education of all the children of America. It seems to me that our recent experiences have taught us that education is a national as well as a state problem.

HEALTH PROBLEMS IN EDUCATION

SALLY LUCAS JEAN, CHILD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, NEW YORK, N.Y. Not until the public was roused to the importance of keeping well babies well was the high mortality-rate among infants appreciably affected. We have found that the establishment of welfare stations where mothers are advised about the care of their sick babies is not an effective means of bringing about a markt drop in the death-rate. It has been proved that the weight of the baby is a most sensitive index to its general condition of health, and the weekly weighing of well babies has been an indispensable measure in the prevention of infant mortality.

Children of school age who are not living under proper hygienic conditions do not die in large numbers; they struggle against the adverse conditions which are hampering their development and lowering their vitality, and the result is a warped, stunted child or grown-up. Up to the present time it has not been found necessary systematically to examine children of