at all stages if children live among adults who habitually show consideration for each other. Among such persons the use of private property follows the greater need or pleasure, whether it be that of the owner or not. If little children see such a course of action followed, their imitativeness will usually lead to their adoption of it in keeping or lending their own belongings. Otherwise, no amount of talking will have much effect.

But surely it is a mistake not to allow a child to have the final control over his own things, even if he is selfish in their use. A child who is required to give or to share with others when he does not want to do so, becomes so much the more aggressive when left to himself, and I believe is less social later on, when he would naturally share with others. If a little child is somewhat selfish, rather than force him to the appearance of unselfishness, I would leave him alone, to the influence of good surroundings, until he enters the next period. The point which I wish to make here, of course, is that merely requiring a child to do certain acts does not lead to his adopting the act as his own. His sympathies are relatively undeveloped at this time, and they grow more normally by imitation than by compulsion.

On the other hand, the beauties of unselfishness are far more likely to be noticed during the period of the second dentition, when children are more susceptible to public opinion than before. Teachers who have children between the ages of six and nine years, give very different reports as to the ease in controlling them. Some say that they are more difficult to manage than kindergarten children, others that they are less. But all with whom I have talked agree that they care more for the good opinion of others, especially of other children, than before. Does not this, perhaps, give the reason why they are sometimes harder, and sometimes easier, to control than before? If we are able to guide the public opinion of the school and to establish an esprit de corps harmonious with the end that we have in view, we control them easily, but if we try to impose an arbitrary and autocratic government, we meet with more or less open rebellion, especially if we shame them before their fellows.

On account of this social spirit, some form of self-government can be successfully used at this age, the teacher, of course, being a member of the government. It matters little, so far as the educational value is concerned, whether the government copies in form that of the city or nation, whether it be informal, or even whether the teacher rules nominally. The essential thing in any case is that the law of the school and the home shall be considered their law by the children, not an inexplicable one coming from outside and maintained in the last resort by compulsion. Only when it is looked on as their own law, do they feel the obligation to control themselves in order to obey it. Only so will they learn the self-government necessary in the members of a democracy.

But even when the children as a whole do make and obey the laws, there will be a few who disobey constantly. Most of the children will lapse occa

sionally, but repent promptly. The habitual offender, however, is harder to deal with.

The most effectual check in such cases is a public opinion strong enough to apply the punishment without the intervention of the teacher. In other cases, the teacher must serve as the officer to carry out the punishment imposed by the school, and if public sentiment is weak and the offense is flagrant, she may even find it necessary to act both as judge and executioner. In the last case, however, it seems to me that it is better to allow some particular cases of wrong-doing to go unpunished than for the teacher to punish in opposition to the general sentiment of the school. The most important thing to do in such a case is to create a better public opinion.

I should perhaps say at this point that no government by the children is likely to impose the requirements of immobility, or even of silence, that are so dear to some of us. The schoolroom will not be a place where each child sits quietly and cons the printed page. Why should it be?

In the period of balance between nine and twelve years, the problem of discipline usually reduces itself to allowing children plenty of opportunity to indulge their tendencies toward primitive life under favorable modern conditions. I do not know that anyone has ever tried the experiment of seeing how children would take to primitive forms of government at this time. Why would it not be worth trying?

Under the usual conditions, self-government will become more firmly established at this time, and certain typical heroes and heroines will be imitated. Bravery is the paramount virtue-not moral courage, but disregard of physical pain-and the adventurous hero is the ideal.

At the entrance to adolescence, when the youth asserts his independence of adults and, tho to a less degree, of his companions, self-government undergoes its greatest strain. Both physically and mentally the youth is going thru the greatest readjustment of his life, and it is not surprising that he resents our disregard of his new view-point. He will never be easy to deal with either singly or en masse, because the physical conditions themselves lead to irritability, but it seems to me that the difficulties in dealing with him can be minimized to some extent.

In the first place, proper training in self-control before this period should have given him habits that will go far to carry him thru this time of transition. In the second place, we ought to give him the recognition and responsibility that he so craves. I mean that we should give it to him in reality, not only for as long as he does what we would do.

Let him manage some things even if he does it incorrectly. He will never see the value of advice until he has found out his own weakness. Let him learn by actual experience what his own limitations are, for thus he will learn persistence and self-control as well as his need of others.

In the following period, when he becomes overwhelmingly social, he enters into the age of hero worship and of ideals. At no other time is the

influence of good books and of friendships so strong. Probably at no other time can a teacher exert so strong and lasting an influence.

Control of the school should now be in the hands of the students, and the teacher's influence should be used even more than before to cultivate close personal friendships between herself and her pupils and between pupils. Of course co-operation should exist in every grade, from the kindergarten up, but surely it reaches its maximum only at this time, in the years of the later high-school, and early college, course. Do not we teachers make a great mistake in leaving the young people of this period to form all sorts of funny and foolish, if not actually harmful, societies by themselves? Surely if we co-operated with them, we could make the home, the school, and the town far better by using this passion for organization to effect some valuable ends. I do not mean that we should manage their societies for them, but that in various indirect ways their ideals of social relations should be made valuable and worthy, as well as interesting, to them. These years of education should be a course in training to conscious social co-operation, and in the establishing of high personal and civic ideals.

With the choice of such ideals, the youth finally enters upon the period of maturity, in which he must constantly set against each other the personal desire and the social need, harmonizing the two when possible and, when not, choosing between them. He has now, as a rule, attained to moral and legal responsibility, and the remainder of his education is that furnished by life. Whether he prefers the wide social service or the narrow personal ambition depends upon his previous training.

Does he amass wealth by wrecking the lives of others? Where then did he form the habit of disregarding others? Does he buy and sell the law? Where did he acquire a contempt of law? Are not our schools responsible to a large degree-equally with our homes-for our present economic and political evils? How can a democracy-a government of the people and for the people-ever succeed if our youth are trained in home and at school to autocratic or monarchical rule? The very foundation of our republic is the training of our children to self-control and to social efficiency and service. Are we giving such training?

DISCUSSION

EDWIN GRANT DEXTER, director, School of Education, The University of Illinois, Urbana, Ill.—The line of thought that I wish to present for your consideration is one borrowed from the biologist. He has accounted for the tremendous process of racial adjustment to a world-environment-racial education, if we adopt a definition of education that is becoming more and more widely accepted, thru reliance upon what is generally known as the "Darwinian Tripod of Evolution." It asserts, first, that more organic forms are brought into existence than can, in the nature of things, mature; second, that no two of these forms are exactly alike; and third, that the ones best fitted to their environment survive. These three laws, variously interpreted, seem to account for the process of

racial adjustment and control as it expresses itself in organic evolution. But this entire process is writ small in the lifetime of the single human individual. What our entire ancestry has accomplished in the progress of ages must, in a sense, be done over again by each human being. The education of the individual is but a synopsis of the education of the race. The evolutionary tripod restated in terms of the latter process is as follows. First, more impulses and interests are born to the child than can be developed with profit; second, these impulses and interests vary with every child; third, only those prophetic of the greatest usefulness in the particular environment in which life is to be spent should be developed: the rest should be suppressed. The general thesis expressed by this application of scientific laws to the profession of the teacher might be stated as of education thru survivals. In terms of it, our educational systems are but features of the environment, controlled for the purpose of making certain that the useful impulses and interests of every child will be discovered and developed to their maximum of efficiency, the latter to be determined by the aim of education for the particular time and place.

By the term impulse is meant inherent tendencies to act; by interests, inherent tendencies to like or to dislike. The human being, in his growth from infancy to maturity, expresses a continuous sequence of impulses and interests, the appearance of which is determined by the laws of nature. Thru a proper selection of the former he gains control of the parts of the body and learns to do things. It seems quite probable that no activity which is essential to the perpetuation and preservation of the race comes in any other way. Let us see if this claim is unreasonable for the motor activities of walking and talking. In the case of the former, we should have to suppose that at an age somewhere between eight and sixteen months, and usually not far from a year, brain centers ripen to use a figure of speech—which set up a series of motions of the legs, varied and almost innumerable; really nothing more than instinctive movements, differing not at all fundamentally from the spasmodic prenatal squirmings, except that some of them enabled the child to do things which he wanted to do, that "want to do" being determined by the laws of growth, and being, in the present case, what we call walking. Not that the child has any conception of walking, and so consciously determines his acts accordingly, but that each motion leading up to the act gives him pleasure in itself, because of enlarging his field of activity. Probably no single act in the series is due to conscious imitation, nor even to that unconscious imitation which we call suggestion, but each act is in itself an impulse, pure and simple, made without any reference to aim or end. Yet of the hundreds of impulsive movements, each different from the other qualitatively and quantitatively, some give no pleasure because they make his world no larger; these are suppressed, are the unfit, which nature eliminates. Others give pleasure by putting things within his reach which otherwise were beyond the limits of the little tangible world which he is building; such are the "fittest," which survive. The only presupposition to this hypothesis of motor functioning is that of many movements natural to the child, and no one who has studied carefully thru the period just preceding that of learning to walk would, I think, wish to question the validity of such a presupposition. We certainly underestimate the possibilities of the little fellow if he has not kicked and squirmed in as many and varied contortions as are possible to his anatomy, and misjudge him if all the movements of walking are not among the myriads of other motions with which they are smothered. Creeping would be explained in the same way, and, coming at the time it does, gives a most admirable corroboration of the culture-epoch theory.

But how about talking? Our hypothesis would presuppose that among the babblings, and the gurglings, and the mumblings, of the months and weeks just preceding the talking period were all the elements of articulate speech, mixed up with hundreds of sounds from which might just as well have been selected the elements of Chinese, Choctaw, and, for aught I know, Chimpansee. Do you question the truth of that, fathers and mothers?

Among the interests common to the child-those likes which do not express themselves in motion-the earliest seems to me to be that for rhythm. What child does not like the mother's crooning lullaby, or the Mother Goose rhymes, or simple poetry?

An interest in flights of the imagination comes next and the fairy-tale and the story of myth are demanded. Next comes the imagination tied down to things of earth, and stories of adventure must be the medium for selection and development. But even this interest, especially with the girls, is soon eclipsed and subdued by an absorption in the things of romance. Religion and humor come in their turn as more or less controlling interests and with them the gamut is perhaps run.

But what, you ask, has the teacher to do with all this? Much, tho not the direction of the whole process. The education of the child covers two more or less distinct periods; one in which the environmental conditions are unmodified for educational purposes, and a second in which they are modified for particular educational ends. The former comprises roughly the first six years of childhood. During it the child probably undergoes more changes than during the other, but they are made in response to the conditions of the home which are established for quite other purposes. For this early period education is but a by-product; not so, however, for the later period. The school is an artificial phase of this environment, established solely for the purpose of selecting and perpetuating the favorable impulses and interests of the child.

If we are responsible for such an environment, and would not be recreant to a trust, we must recognize these facts: first, that the impulses and interests of the child express themselves in a sequence determined by nature and entirely beyond our control; second, that they are but temporary and must be seized upon at the opportune time; and third, that a sufficiently broad and varied environment be provided to make certain that none escapes detection. With these three fundamentals of education provided, nature will

take care of the rest.

THE SCHOOL AND THE CHILD'S PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT STUART H. ROWE, HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY BROOKLYN TRAINING SCHOOL FOR TEACHERS, BROOKLYN, N. Y.

"You teachers kill a lot of girls every year. You would kill a lot of boys too, but you can't." Such, if correctly reported, was the pointed charge made by an eminent common-sense thinker on educational questions against a representative body of teachers. In remedying the errors to be pointed out in this article, and in the recommendations made, I believe that nothing is required of the teacher which common-sense does not dictate to be of the first importance to the child. So much progress has been made in years past in lighting, heating, ventilating, and seating schools and so much emphasis has been laid on these problems that these former scapegoats of teachers' mistakes no longer serve their ancient useful purpose. Consequently, I shall take for granted the essential features of equipment such as a building with rooms lighted from the left, or left and rear (in which case the architect has left the teacher to protect his own eyes as best he can), or from the left and right, with curtains to cut off direct sunlight, with no desks darkened by wide piers or pillars, with forced ventilation, and indirect and adequate heating, with a sanitary cellar and closets, with baths if possible, with hygienic