A Magazine devoted to Child-Study, especially in those departments that have direct bearing upon the practical problems contained in the education of the child. WILLIAM O. KROHN, PH.D., Psychologist, Eastern Illinois Hospital, Kankakee, Ill. ALFRED BAYLISS, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Springfield, Ill. TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF PUBLICATION. SUBSCRIPTION PRICE, One Dollar a year. Single copies, 10 cents. Clubs of five or more, 80 cents a year. Foreign subscriptions, $1.30 per year. Subscribers failing to receive THE MONTHLY by the tenth of the month will confer a favor by sending a postal card to the publisher. DISCONTINUANCE.-When so ordered, THE MONTHLY is discontinued at the expiration of the subscription. Otherwise it is assumed that a continuance is desired, and it will be sent until all CHANGE OF ADDRESS.-When change of address is ordered, both the new and old address HOW TO REMIT.-Remittances should be sent by Draft, Express Order, Money Order or RECEIPTS.-Remittances are acknowledged by change of label on wrapper, indicating date to Oh, holly branch and mistletoe, And Christmas chimes where'er we go. And stockings pinned up in a row! These are thy gifts, December!-H. F. Blodgett. EDITORIAL. A PERENNIAL QUESTION. DEAR CHILD-STUDY MONTHLY: Which is the better-to permit a child to believe in Santa Claus or to undeceive him as to his belief in his "patron saint?" THOUGH good old Santa Claus has a large and ever in creasing constituency we are again compelled, as is the custom at this season of the year, to have dinned into our ears the old stock of sentimental snobbery, accompanied by the usual prudish pratings and prancings that brand Santa Claus as a falsehood. These are the same people who would smother, throttle and stifle every poetical tendency in the child. To them idealism should have no chance for culture in our educational systems; the imagination should have its wings clipped, that none of the delightful excursions of the child into his world of makebelieve can be encouraged. Such a position reveals only the meanest, most sordid, most belittling kind of sentimentality. To such persons the world must needs ever remain a dull blank and man a grinning skull-if they are consistent; and yet we frequently find these same individuals, who would bar out Santa Claus from his position as one of the central figures in the child-world, indulging in flights of imagination that betoken little less than an emotional drunk. Many seek to eliminate and dethrone idealism from its conspicuous and efficient place in the rosy-hued child-world, and at the same time, indulge in some of the wildest ravings of the rainbow-chasing order. It is not rare that we find the same person who would rob the child of his Santa Claus, and the thereby enriched childhood, himself indulging in phantasmagorias as grotesque and ridiculous as a patented recipe for extracting sunshine from cucumbers. A careful inventory of their own mental operations would reveal a condition of inconsistency and change as evanescent as Aguinaldo's postoffice address. If the critics of the Santa Claus idea were sincere and consistent in their endeavor to brand "good, jolly old Kris" as a falsehood, they would proceed in their Gradgrind exactness until they clipped the child of every tentacle of the imagination that makes possible the very capacity for the appreciation of the best in art and literature. The logical consequence of the narrow-minded, flatchested, cold-hearted creed of these Gradgrinds is the eradication of the only possibility of the child's appreciation of the ideally true, beautiful and good. "We are born," says Arlo Bates in his recently published Lowell Lectures, "not only with a craving to know what emotions are the birthright of man, but with an instinctive desire to enter into that inheritance. * * Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats made no great or sharply defined distinction between the things which were true in fact and the things which were true in the imagination. It is only when man learns to know and to enter the world of imagination, that he comes into actual contact with the vital and fundamental in human life." Certain it is, and always will be as long as humanity is human, that our emotional experiences are our most real experiences. This is as true in childhood as in adult life. Of course we must distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality. The child's belief in Santa Claus is a healthy, helpful, potent sentiment. The criticism of this by an embittered, acidulated adult is a belittling, sordid, maudlin sentimentality. Sentiment is what the human heart really feels; sentimentality is what the Gradgrind persuades himself he thinks he feels. Conviction itself has its source in the imagination; in fact, imagination might well be labeled "the realizing faculty." Without imagination neither the child nor the adult would have a realizing sense of the true in literature, the beautiful in art or the good in ethical conduct. Sam Jones, in his uncouth manner, says some persons can not look up and, if they could, would be "unable to see any higher than they can spit." Likewise, there are those to whom the education of healthy, throbbing childhood is committed, who would bring the zenith of the heavens, the heights of which are attained only by the activity of the imagination, down to the level of the child's nose, ears and eyes, soiling the most delightful and uplifting conceptions with a moldy earth-touch. A parent or teacher who would do this is to our mind "born a button short" or, to use a term from the expressive vernacular of the streets, but dignified by that noble and intensely human literary Philistine, Fra Elbertus, such a person has "bats in his belfry " which, being interpreted, meaneth "rats in his garret" or "wheels in his head." How refreshing to turn from the carping critics of the enriching Santa Claus idealism to read the reply (from the masterful pen of the illustrious Dana) in the old files of the New York Sun to a child's question, "Is there a Santa Claus?" It reads as follows: IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS? We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great |